Prologue
Medicine has never been a straight road. It is a winding path paved with good intentions, painful errors, and moments of brilliance. With this piece I hope to take you through some of the most bizarre practices of each time period. Each act, grotesque as it now seems, was born not of malice but hope. What follows is not a mockery of the past, but a reflection of the human condition; living, learning and striving for survival.
Antiquity and the Medieval Period (c. 30,000 BCE- 1500 CE)
You are in ancient Morocco, tending to your small commensal farm when a sharp deafening ring erupts in your right ear. You try to ignore it, but it’s swiftly followed by a crushing pain that wraps around your head like a tightening metal band. You want to endure it but are unable to, this is the worst headache of your life.
You stumble through your field of wheat and lentils, each step heavier than the last, until you reach the home of the local hakim at the town’s outskirts.
By the time you arrive, your eyes are bloodshot and your mouth thick with saliva. The healer wastes no time. He lays you down on a pile of straw and reaches for a hard, grey stone. He explains that evil spirits have taken up residence in your skull and must be set free. He is going to drill a hole in your head. Then, without hesitation, he places the rock against your head and begins to hammer.
The pain you arrived with is nothing compared to this. Each blow sends a violent echo through your skull. The world begins to blur, the pounding grows distant, your eyes fill with blood, and slowly you give way to unconsciousness.
The Age of Heroic Medicine (c. 1600- 1890)
It is the 19th century, a time of steam and soot, of telegrams and gaslight. Advances in medicine now promise that if you play your cards right, you could live to the ripe age of 30 or 40.
You are the English teacher in a modest London classroom. One of your pupils, a quiet girl with a red ribbon in her hair, has asked to use the washroom five times already. It is not yet noon. Her face is pale and her voice barely audible, you recall the Cholera outbreak reported in the morning’s paper. Concerned, you ask the mathematics teacher to watch your class. You wrap the girl’s coat around her shoulders, she is too weak to walk so you carry her across the cobble street to the hospital.
You are greeted by the nurse who takes the little girl from you and lays her on a narrow iron bed. The physician arrives shortly, quickly examines her and talks about a new experimental method that could save her life. Milk, injected directly into the veins. It is white, pure and nourishing and there are reports of its success in Toronto. You watch as he boils cow’s milk, filters it through a muslin and draws it into a huge metal syringe. He eventually finds a vein in her forearm and pushes all the milk into it.
For a moment, she appears fine, her cheeks return some colour and you feel some hope. But within an hour, she begins to shiver, then her body jerks violently. Her eyes roll back, and her small frame convulses against the metal bed. Moments later, she falls still, her eyes wide open, her tiny hands limp at the edge of the bed and her red ribbon detached from her hair.
The nurse frantically ushers you out of the room, you step out into the cold London air, the smell of smoke in your lungs and the picture of her red ribbon on your mind.
The Scientific Renaissance (c. 1890- 1945)
Welcome to the 20th century, a period of remarkable scientific advancement. An era when the human body was no longer a mystery. It was the age of discovery and invention: antibiotics, vaccines, and X-rays forever changed the course of medicine.
You are a wealthy industrialist. Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium has captivated the world. Scientific studies now suggest that it can stimulate cell activity. Bottles of distilled water infused with radium isotopes line the shelves of stores. Liquid Sunshine, they call it, promising vitality, vigour, and virility.
You buy a jar to try for yourself, the first sip leaves you tingling, you feel rejuvenated and alive. Was it a placebo or the miracle they claimed? You do not care. You buy more jars and drink them faithfully.
Years pass, and you remain loyal to the regimen. But something changes. Your teeth begin to loosen, your jaw aches when you chew, and you tire more easily. The morphine your doctor prescribes dulls the pain only for a while. Soon, your jaw begins to decay, you can feel the bone crumbling beneath your skin.
One evening, in agony and despair, you reach for the shelves that have always held your salvation. Your hand trembles as you pick up a jar of that miracle water you have been faithful to all these years. Maybe, just maybe, it will help.
The Horrors that Healed Us
You have lived through trepanning, seen a little child pumped full of cow’s milk, and swallowed potions that glowed.
You have endured the horrors of certainty built on error, the grotesque and the unfathomable. Yet, between the absurd and the miraculous, medicine learned to listen. The fact that we can now recognise the absurdities in some of these practices is testament enough.
I would be the first to admit that this article gives a biased account, because beyond these stories lie a thousand and one practices that brought healing and relief. I was only limited by my own self imposed constraints in keeping up with the theme.
Your instinct to the above stories may be to criticise, maybe even to pity. But at the end of the day, we are only as good as the information we have at the moment. And it would be unjust of us to judge our forebears when we stand in the treasure trove of their pain, sacrifices, and discoveries. The road here was a long and winding one, but it brought us closer to something resembling sanity.
We stand now in the bright theatre of modern medicine, convinced of our advancement. Perhaps we are. Or perhaps we’ve only traded one jar of Liquid Sunshine for another. And someone, someday, will look back at us and wonder why we ever thought this was healing.
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