Five reasons to be grateful for your pharmacist
Who doesn’t love to daydream about the past? I know I find myself staring out the window of the GO train imagining myself as a jaded outlaw in the Wild West or a brilliant emerging artist wandering the streets of Renaissance Florence…
Until, that is, I remember how dangerous a papercut could be.
Now, if you do find yourself transported into your historical fantasies, be warned that you may be surprised by the era’s selection of cures for your maladies. To prepare you, here is an assortment of odd medicinal measures.
Marriage
I am sure it is hardly surprising to learn that marriage was a solution to hysteria. Derived from the Greek hystera, meaning “womb,” hysteria was considered a physical disorder by ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian societies. It was believed that the uterus could dry up, causing it to float through the body and apply pressure to one’s other internal organs. The results ranged from anxiety to seizures, depending on which organs were impacted. Afflicted women were often advised to marry; however, if you find yourself in the ancient world and accused of being hysterical, know that massages were an alternative prescription.
Lip Service
This disgusting to imagine yet useful technique was a pivotal part of the medieval surgical assistant’s role. “Lip service,” or “wound sucking,” was a method of cleaning in which one used their mouth to suck out the filth and blood clots of a fresh wound before it is closed. Should the injury be caused by a poisoned arrow, the sucker would first take oil into their mouth as a preventative measure against being poisoned themselves. This technique, while difficult to think of as anything but revolting, was not ineffective. By the eighteenth century, it was still in use as a way to clear blood clots and foreign bodies from injured soldiers. As such, doctors continued to innovate ways to clean wounds via suction without having to use mouths. This continued up to the 1990s, with the modern “negative pressure wound treatment.”
Maggot Therapy
This is another more gruesome medieval technique of wound cleaning with surprisingly effective results. Employed as a method to prevent gangrene, physicians of the Middle Ages would wrap maggots in cheesecloth before placing it on a wound. Although this procedure appears strange, as maggots’ association with decay and rot makes them seem foreign and dangerous in a medical setting, the logic behind it is quite sound. Maggots do not eat live tissue, so they leave it alone while they consume dead flesh, effectively debriding a wound. In addition, their secretions contain antibiotics, a further boost to wound management.
Mercury
Mercury has quite the history of being used as a treatment for skin diseases, so when syphilis began to spread across Europe at the close of the fifteenth century, the prominent skin lesions accompanying it pointed to mercury as a possible remedy. Starting in the early sixteenth century, physicians advised that the afflicted use ointments containing mercury as a treatment, as internal administration of mercury seemed to carry too high of a risk of overdosing; however, in the late eighteenth century, internal administration of mercury began to overtake external uses, given to patients via enemas, gums, or calomel (the salt mercurous chloride, sometimes dissolved in a solution of water and alcohol). It is theorised that mercury poisoning was not uncommon; however, it is hard to ascertain exactly how common it was as the side effects of mercury poisoning were probably written off as symptoms of the disease it was being used to treat. Ultimately, mercury was used as a syphilis treatment into the twentieth century.
Lamb’s Blood
In the nineteenth century, there was a fascination with using lamb’s blood as medicine, but not by ingesting it. Rather, there was abundant curiosity towards its use in blood transfusions. Transfusions had been a part of European medical discussions since the seventeenth century, when William Harvey’s theory of blood circulation had been accepted. The nineteenth century’s revival of the technique began with James Blundell, a young doctor in London who performed many human-to-human transfusions from the mid-1820s onwards. This was a departure from the medical tradition of bloodletting, as the norm was to bleed patients rather than add blood to their system. Though wartime casualties of the 1870s piqued interest in lamb’s blood being used in lieu of human blood, experimentation began off the battlefield, as a rising number of tuberculosis patients grew desperate for a cure. Part of the logic of using lamb’s blood was that it was easier to obtain than a human’s. With a lamb, a doctor can easily gain access to arterial blood—a procedure they wouldn’t dream of doing on a person—without having to deal with the unpredictable reactions that human donors may have. Some doctors described miracle-like results, with reports of patients regaining appetite and taking walks after lamb’s blood transfusions; however, the hope that came with the initial success began to fade as patients, who had drastically improved in days after the procedure, quickly deteriorated in the weeks after. From there, lamb’s blood transfusions grew in controversy and faltered in reliability, ultimately disappearing from usage within the medical field.
Of course, no historical article is complete without an author getting up on their soapbox and preaching something about the bigger picture.
I would like to take some time to say that it’s easy to judge medicine of the past, whether it be to cringe at the gruesome or laugh at the “illogical.” We are used to modern medicine, comforted by its science and accuracy, healed by its cures, and unfamiliar with the concept of not knowing. We are used to confidence. It is hard to imagine a time when physicians still had more to discover about the human body, the nature of diseases, and the world of medicine. It is hard to imagine uncertainty.
That is a bias to bear in mind when reading about historical medicine. While there is nothing wrong with feeling your stomach turn at grisly details or enjoying a quick laugh at strange reasonings – both reactions I’ve had myself – we should not always turn to condemnation. After all, these medical practitioners were doing their best to help the sick and injured with the knowledge base that they had. When all you know are the four humours, bloodletting seems perfectly logical. There is little reason to point and jeer at those trying to heal with all they had when there is a real dark side to the history of medicine, one that still affects people worldwide to this day.
May your papercuts heal without issue,
Hannah Teather
