Heroin, draining blood, and 8 more greatest mistakes in medicine

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Heroin, mercury, bleeding and surgery that transform patients into apathetic zombies. The Swedish Illustrerad Vetenskap offers a peek into the horrific archive of medicine. Here are ten of the biggest mistakes doctors made from antiquity to the 20th century - and only one of them brought pleasure, not suffering.

Explore the gruesome medical records for ten of the worst medical errors in history.

10. Orgasm against female hysteria - used until 1980

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, some women suffered from "hysteria." Doctors treated this ailment with a massage machine that brought them to orgasm.

However, the results were very unstable and the treatment had to be repeated at intervals of several weeks.

9. Children became drug addicts - used until 1930

Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup was the name given to many parents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for their restless children.

The medicine contained morphine, which caused addiction in children, and even killed many.

8. Homosexuals were treated with electroshock - until 1992

For most of the 20th century, science has been claiming that homosexuality is a curable disease.

Therefore, doctors subjected homosexuals to a variety of treatments, from "homosexual drugs" and hypnosis to psychotherapy and electroshock.

7. Useful cigarettes - used until 1926

The tobacco plant was brought to Europe from America, where doctors began to praise nicotine for its medicinal properties.

Today tobacco is considered the main cause of lung cancer.

6. Addiction to "medicinal" heroin - up to 1910

In 1898, the German pharmaceutical company Bayer began selling heroin as a medicine for coughs and tuberculosis.

The chemists of the company were sure that the new drug did not cause addiction.

5. Drilling holes in the skull - used to this day

From the Stone Age to the middle of the Middle Ages, ancient surgeons tried to treat ailments such as migraines by removing part of the cranial bone or making holes in the skull.

The idea was to get evil spirits out of the head through the hole. Such operations were incredibly painful and the risk of infection was very high, but excavations indicate that a surprisingly large number of patients survived.

In principle, trepanation is still used today, for example, in the treatment of the consequences of cerebral hemorrhages.

4. Mercury as a medicine - used until the 20th century

For several thousand years, doctors have been convinced that almost anything can be cured with mercury. The Chinese emperor Ying Zheng (259 - 210 BC), for example, took liquid metal all his life, despite the fact that his tongue was swollen and his gums were inflamed.

Doctors now know that mercury disrupts the brain, increases blood pressure, harms digestion, causes breathing problems, and promotes depression and anxiety.

3. Bled to death - until the XX century

At one time, doctors believed that diseases arise from an imbalance in the main body fluids: blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile. The bloodletting was supposed to rid the patient of the excess of one of the fluids, but it often ended very badly.

One of the victims was the first President of the United States, George Washington, who in 1799 allowed doctors to try to cure his throat infection by bloodletting.

The main task of the blood is to transport oxygen and nutrients to the cells. Doctors released 3.75 liters of blood near Washington (80% of the total), after which he became very weak and died on the same day.

2. Poor hygiene killed millions - until the 18th century

Bathing is not only unnecessary - it can also make you sick with the plague. This was the opinion of doctors in the 16th century. “Baths and baths should be banned, because after them the skin becomes soft and the pores open. Because of this, as we could see, the plague-infected dirt enters the body and causes instant death, said, for example, the French court physician Ambroise Paré in 1568.

Therefore, for almost 300 years, Europeans avoided soap and water and only in the most extreme cases carefully washed their skin if the pollution could not be removed with a dry towel.

However, the aversion to water was a catastrophic mistake.

The plague was transmitted by flea bites, and it was because of the uncleanliness of people that fleas spread. During the time it took for doctors to come up with something better, their delusion has claimed millions of lives.

1. Dissection of the white matter: the patient became a zombie - used until 1983

Never before has such a creepy treatment received such magnificent acclaim as in 1949, when Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his invention of the "white matter dissection" - the lobotomy. Doctors of the time believed that lobotomy cured the mentally ill, but in fact, this procedure turned them into "vegetables."

Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz in 1935 came to the conclusion that he could make patients with psychiatric diseases calm and docile by cutting the nerve connections in the frontal lobes.

According to his idea, the dissection of the white matter made it possible to separate the thinking part of the brain from the feeling part. Doctors around the world have adopted the Moniz method.

One of them improved the operating method so much that the procedure began to take only six minutes. An instrument resembling an awl was driven through the cranial bone just above the eyeball into the frontal lobe, after which the doctor moved it up and down.

Then the same was repeated over the other eye. At least 50 thousand people underwent lobotomy.

After that, the emotional life of the majority became very limited, because it is the frontal lobes that are responsible for the person's personality. Many, for example, began to behave like little children or suffer from dementia, if they did not turn into real zombies at all.