Weird and wonderful medicine!

Weird and Wonderful Medicine!
Medical practice has come an awful long way in the last few years, and an even longer way compared to just a few decades ago. We are all now used to going to the doctor and having a range of fantastical medical technologies available to us. However, this was not always the case, and doctors back in the day had to be a bit innovative in their treatments… which were not always the best thing for the poor unsuspecting patient.

This is a compilation of a few of the weird and wonderful practices that frequented medicine in days gone by – for those of you sitting the GAMSAT® Exam this year, this will hopefully provide some comic relief from your early preparations!

Heroin cough syrup (For Kids!)

Back in the day, Bayer (who also commercialised aspirin) manufactured some heroin syrup to cure the common cough and cold. Nothing quite like some heroin to soothe your poor toddler’s throat. This ‘effective’ medication was available to purchase from the late 1890s and was marketed towards children in a number of advertisements, up to as late as 1912.

In an ironic twist, one of the reasons heroin was developed in the first place was as a non-addictive substitute to morphine. Unfortunately, it turned out to be even worse than its predecessor. Bayer ceased making heroin syrup (and all heroin products) in 1913.


Mice
Ancient Egyptians thought a toothache could be cured by making a kind of 'dead mouse paste' with herbs and other ingredients, while in Elizabethan England, half a dead mouse was used to treat warts.

Ice pick to the brain
The psychiatrist Waler Freeman was the first to ‘popularise’ the lobotomy treatment. Freeman even conducted ‘Lobotomy Tours’ around American, performing approximately 40,000 - 50,000 procedures during the late 1940s and early 1950s. If the original ‘drilling into the brain’ method wasn’t gruesome enough, Freeman revolutionised lobotomies by reducing the operation time to ten minutes – basically he just hammered an ice pick into the patient’s brain via the eye and wiggled it around.

Lobotomies were usually performed on the mentally ill, with the idea that by removing 'extra emotions' by cutting certain nerves in the brain, they could be cured. Not surprisingly, results were extremely hard to predict, and varied from successful to tragic.

Bloodletting and leeches
Bloodletting has been around since the time of the Egyptians, but reached its peak of popularity in Europe in the 19th century. Basically, the practice evolved because it was believed the human body contained elements of air, water, earth and fire in the form of liquids (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.)

According to this theory, one reason a patient displayed signs of illness was due to the elements being out of balance. A remedy to cure this was bloodletting -- the practice of relieving a patient of 'extra' blood.

The use of leeches in Europe fell into decline after 1850, though they are still sometimes used in Western medicine today in surgery to help heal skin grafts and restore blood circulation, or to remove congested blood from a wound.

Cocaine in the eye
In 1884 Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller discovered the tissue-numbing properties of the drug and would use a few drops of cocaine as a local anaesthetic before surgery. It was deemed so effective, other physicians started using it as an anaesthetic for procedures on the throat and nose as well.

Later, the use of cocaine spread to medicinal tonics, "cocoa wine", toothache drops and, of course, Coca Cola.

 

Goat testicles
In the final ‘weird and wonderful’ medical practices to share with you… this one is definitely more ‘weird’ than ‘wonderful’. John R. Brinkley, who was not a doctor (he bought a diploma from a diploma mill for $500), became one of the wealthiest ‘doctors’ in America, after claiming he could cure impotence, infertility, and other sexual problems by surgically implanting goat testicles into a man's scrotum.

Brinkley, named the 'Goat Gland Doctor', conducted extremely dangerous procedures; rotting goats' testicles and gangrenous incisions brought death to several hundred patients.

I hope this has stirred your interest in medical history, and has given a fascinating, yet disturbing, insight into how far we’ve come with modern medical technology!

Check out our GAMSAT To Med School Podcast for more interesting news, tips & tricks about the GAMSAT, applying to medical school, and life at med school.