I’m reading a new book about everyday life in Elizabethan London, and—predictably—the chapter on medicine is the most hilariously horrifying. Bed-wetting can be treated by “the stones of a hedgehog, powdered,” “pigeon’s dung” for shingles, and for epilepsy, “the stone that is found in the belly of a young swallow.”
The most cringe-making treatment is for retention of urine: “Take two or three lice, as great as you can get, and put them into the yard [penis] into the innermost hole that goeth into the body and put a little cloth therein that they may creep in.” Just thinking about it would make you stop retaining your urine!
Anyone know of any other good ones, or sites? I tried Googling, but came up with little of interest.
Imagine a few hundred more years into the future people will be saying, “Do you believe that people in olden days would actually cut you open to remove one of your organs?” :eek:
At home I have a two volume set called “The Common Sense Medical Advisor.” It was printed in the late 19th Century by a Dr. Pierce, who ran and “Invalids Hospital” in Buffalo, NY. The set is full of medical “wisdom” from the period, and is equally full of testimonials who rave about the curative powers of “Dr. Pierce’s Purgative Pellets” (I’m not making the name up, either). According to the testimonials, they cured everthing from “nervous prostration” and a host of “women’s complaints” to variocele and “piles the size of a hen’s egg.” Piles are 'roids, IIRC. It also has tons of drawings of people in all sorts of contraptions that were supposed to treat various and sundry ailments. Almost all of them involve electricity and water in some combination.
Did you know that old people give off effluvia that is detrimental to children’s health? That women should not ride bicycles because it tends to excite the generative organs? That self-abuse is the world’s most delibiltating contagion?
Well, if you had asked Dr. Pierce’s “Common Sense Medical Advisor” you would know all of that - and plenty more besides.
Don’t know if this counts, but I love the old “cure” for feminine “hysteria” – the doctor would apply a vibrating metal contraption to the genital region of the patient.
Black Death! That is racist! Where is Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson? Where is White Death or Yellow Death or Latte Colored Death? The rest of the world demands to have a terrible plague named after their skin color!
What kind of a quack are you? What’ll you suggest next? A balsam specific?
Eve Clearly needs to have a hysterical paroxysm. Fortunately, I’m very skilled in inducing hysterical paroxysms.
Shirley Ujest Tuberculosis, that’s consumption to you laypeople, was aslo known as the White Death. The skin of sufferers would become pale to the point of transparency. They would also have an overabundance of the white humour, mucous.
