Cocaine instead of anesthetizing and treating with mercury: physicians for years hid from us the whole truth about treatment in hospitals!
In the corners of the history of mankind, we can find quite strange facts, one mention of which provokes sincere bewilderment among contemporaries. So, for example, the methods of treatment, formerly popular with medical professionals many years ago, today seem like a real mockery of the sick people for whom they were applied.
1. The use of cocaine and opium as an analgesic
Of course, narcotic drugs are still used by doctors in extreme cases. But if now they are subject to strict accounting, then the most popular painkiller of the beginning of the last century - cocaine, was prescribed for depression, minor pain, inflammatory processes. Cocaine became popular, because the Austrian optometrist Karl Kohler discovered his anesthetic properties and suggested that the authorities freely sell cocaine through pharmacies at a low price. In American pharmacies it could be bought for 5-10 cents, and therefore it became popular even among black slaves. Their owners were happy with how the drug works on them. And not only they: political scientists of the first half of the XX century wrote:
"Cocaine strengthens the spirit of Americans with their initiative and energy."
2. Eating mercury
The first story that mercury is incredibly useful for the human body, invented by the ancient Egyptians. They believed that a toxic substance could expel an evil spirit from the body or weaken its influence on the victim and therefore forced all the sick to drink mercury and even mummified in it the bodies of powerful magicians. In the Middle Ages, the fans did not diminish: on the contrary, with the advent of venereal diseases, mercury as a medicine again became fashionable. She allegedly helped to get rid of the "sweetheart disease" - syphilis. The fact that the patient did not tolerate treatment with the strongest poison, according to the doctors of the past, only proved that he would soon recover. Not surprisingly, almost all patients died, and survivors - suffered from dementia.
3. Bleeding
Hippocrates, one of the most famous doctors of antiquity, came up with a monstrous theory that in the human body blood, mucus and bile should always be in equal proportions. The cause of all the diseases known to him, he believed a violation of this balance, which was to be treated by bloodletting with a knife. Even the fact that the patient did not always survive after the procedure did not stop Hippocrates and his followers who bleed until the end of the fourteenth century.
4. Hydrotherapy
In the XVI-XVII centuries young ladies and young men widely popularized this way of shirking from homework, unequal marriages and studies, like hysterics. Resourceful doctors immediately invented a method for treating hysterics: a patient or a sick person was placed in a tub of cold water or poured from head to foot. The medicine was really effective, but it acted only because no one wanted to experience such feelings again.
5. The application of dead mice and the manufacture of therapeutic paste from them
Animals in many countries at different times served as a medicine for humans. In the Elizabethan era in England, doctors decided that dead rodents possess restorative and healing properties. The cut corpuscles were applied to open wounds, and inside they used a paste from their entrails to calm the toothache or urinary incontinence.
6. Transplantation of testicles from animals
In the first half of the 20th century, the Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff was forced to emigrate to France, because his colleagues in tsarist Russia did not share his views on surgery. Serge believed that he invented his own method of transplanting male genital organs, giving the representatives of the stronger sex a second youth. At first he tried to transplant the testicles of those convicted to death by the rich, but failed in bed men, but the method was not effective. Serge moved to Paris, where he himself spread the legend that transplantation of the testicles will rejuvenate the body and raise the level of potency. Now he transplanted the testicles of monkeys, but desperate patients realized too quickly that miracles do not happen.
7. Orgasmotherapy
Vibrators were originally invented not for female entertainment. In the XIX century, doctors seriously believed that sexual satisfaction can cure a woman of hysterics and seizures. First they applied vegetable oil on the genitals of patients and massaged them until the girls reached orgasm. But then the doctors began to complain massively that this procedure is too tiring for them - and the scientists came to their aid. Mechanical, and later also electric sex toys canceled the need for "manual" work.
8. Snake pit
Throughout many centuries, any incomprehensible disease, doctors treated exorcism, believing that, only after expelling evil spirits, you can bring relief to the sufferer. To frighten them, the patients were not only poured with icy water or were given mercury: no less popular was the method of keeping a person over a pit with poisonous snakes. It was assumed that the spirits would get frightened of them and leave the victim's body in a hurry.
9. Electric shock
Electroconvulsive therapy is so frightening that it can still be seen in every second horror film. It was blossoming in the first half of the 20th century, when patients in psychiatric hospitals were daily subjected to the transmission of an electrical impulse through the body. Attributing this practice to utility, the doctors were cunning - they made it easier for themselves, not for the sick. A multi-day "treatment" with electric shock turned victims into weak-willed beings, who did not have to watch and spend money on expensive drugs for them.
10. Lobotomy
Today, it is difficult to believe that lobotomy, as well as electroshock therapy, was once considered a progressive method of treatment. To the doctor who created it, the Portuguese Egash Monish was even given the Nobel Prize. He was able to convince the entire scientific community that by removing the frontal lobes of the brain it is possible to solve the problem of diseases of the nervous system.
American physician Walter Freeman adopted his idea and began to drive around the country on a "lobotomobile", offering fast operations to all who suffered from depression and other disorders of the nervous system. Walter did not cut the frontal lobes: he introduced a knife to splash the ice through the eye socket and cut the nerve fibers. In any city in the US in which he visited, there were people who looked like walking dead, not capable of intelligent thinking. After a grand scandal, the methodology quickly turned off.