It wasn’t so many years ago that enemas, especially made from herbal teas or coffee, were used for pretty much any ailment, because it gave the impression that they were doing something.
Many of us have heard of people using coffee enemas as a quack treatment for cancer. It’s called the Gerson treatment, and when it was devised in the 1920s, it probably worked about as well as any other treatment available at the time. We do have better methods now.
And moldy bread was only one of many possible substances used as poultices by those healers. Some of the others included mud, rotten meat, and the dung of various animals, which would be almost guaranteed to make things worse.
Yeah.
Now, as a drawing salve or for sore muscles some of those could work. But as a wound treatment? ecch.
I have taken microbiology classes. 300X isn’t good enough to resolve bacteria. We had to use 1000X oil lenses, and even then there wasn’t too much detail beyond shape.
Genuine questions - I’m interested; I hope this doesn’t sound like disbelief - the hospital pharmacy kept an aquarium of leeches for just such an order? Did you have to feed and care for the leeches? Did you get many orders?
There are labs which breed these creatures, and the ones I retrieved were about 1 inch long and 1/4 inch thick. After they are done, they are plucked off the patient and euthanized in a jar of alcohol. I’m pretty sure they did the same thing with maggots. They aren’t set free, and they aren’t reused either, although it would be pretty hard to reuse maggots, because their maggot cycle lasts only a few days anyway.
(One of my favorite nonfiction writers, Mary Roach, once referred to maggots as “haciendas” because she thought the word “maggot” was too ugly.)
p.s. Leeches can go for a long time without eating.
According to a 2005 article in The New Yorker, the leeches are bred and then kept unfed until they’re used on the patient. They can last a year or longer without feeding. The leeches have to be completely sterile (as in germ-free) until they’re used on a patient. (I think I’m remembering the article correctly.)
There remain remote areas of the world where the main cause of infant death is neonatal tetanus. How does this happen? They dress the umbilical cord with mud, because they believe that since crops grow in soil, dressing the cord with soil will help the baby grow. It’s one of those “it’s the way we’ve always done it” things, and it’s been very difficult to convince them that this is why so many of their babies die.
Rather than getting them to stop using mud, has anyone tried convincing them to boil the mud first?
I don’t think that would help, because the toxin is not inactivated by boiling, or freezing for that matter.
Interesting, I looked up neonatal tetanus and couldn’t find a reference to using soil/mud beyond these lines (which BTW mention substances even worse than soil!)
“Risk factors associated with neonatal and maternal tetanus
Factors associated with unsafe procedures
-Traditional substances used for umbilical cord care (ie, cow dung, rat faeces, cow ghee, other oils or juices, herbs, ash, surma, [kohl] soil, sand)
-Neonates swaddled in animal dung or soil”
https://www.who.int/immunization/diseases/Maternal_and_neonatal_tetanus_Seminar.pdf?ua=1
Isn’t tetanus caused by bacteria? They’d be killed by boiling.
The TOXIN isn’t destroyed at 212 degrees. That’s what makes people with tetanus so dreadfully ill.
The pathophysiology is that spores get into a wound or other hospitable anaerobic environment, germinate, reproduce, and release the toxin in sufficient amounts to cause the clinical illness.
If infection is prevented (by immunization or by the killing of the spores) then toxin is not produced in sufficient amount to cause disease.
ETA or replacement of cow dung with another substance like water …
And ordinary boiling isn’t sufficient to kill the spores; though it looks like a pressure cooker can do it.
Whether there’s something readily available to the people dressing the umbilical cord with mud that will work, I don’t know. I agree that it might be easier to convince them to treat the mud first than to convince them not to use it at all.
Here’s what does work, apparently (scroll much of the way down the page):
The spores are extremely stable in the environment, retaining the ability to germinate and cause disease indefinitely. They withstand exposure to ethanol, phenol, or formalin but can be rendered noninfectious by iodine, glutaraldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, or autoclaving at 121° C and 103 kPa (15 psi) for 15 minutes.
Good one.
Bloodletting calmed the agitated sick. It reduced the amount of fluid for the heart to pump, so often seemed to be making a subtle improvement.
What I don’t know is why the other parts of heroic medicine, like enemas, were used so often.
While I think medicine today is way better than in the past, not everything commonly done today is evidence based. Does it help patients to be told to lose weight? Probably not. (Although it would be almost impossible to test every sentence a doc can say to a patient to see which actually have a positive effect on the desired patient behavior.)
The link provided by @gkster discusses that programs that convinced parents in a Masai community to switch to water or milk instead of dung work well noting that both are culturally acceptable alternatives.
Which I think is insight that underlies
@Chronos’s comment: come up with a change that is compatible for the culture, not just what makes sense from our outsider perspective. It is common sense which means it is often not considered!
Yeah the spores are durable buggers. That’s an impressive list of what doesn’t work to kill them!
This is why the scientific method was so revolutionary when people started adopting it. Our brains are TERRIBLE at determining what does and doesn’t work. But statistical analysis, control groups, and peer review all help.
In the Roman Empire, or in Europe in the thousand or so years after it fell? Hardly. And certainly not anywhere else beforehand. As you present it, you’re talking about a scientific method of thinking that wasn’t really in use at that time.
Certainly the ancient Greeks had their systems of logic, which the Romans adopted, and these were very valuable in their own way. But the idea of testing independent variables against a control group is SHOCKINGLY modern.
It probably made a dramatic improvement in a few cases – cases in which the problem was hemochromatosis.
When you don’t have large sample groups, the idea of control groups, and as @Babale says a system of statistical analysis: an occasional case of dramatic improvement could make quite an impression. Especially when the same treatment also caused dramatic improvement when repeated after symptoms recurred; and also did so in one of that patient’s relatives.
Maybe in part because you also need large groups in order for it to work at all. When we were at lower population levels, it wouldn’t generally have been possible for any particular physician to come up with large enough numbers of patients with the same problem to apply statistical analysis to, even if they’d had sufficient knowledge of statistics to do so. And it’s only relatively recently that fast and easy communication among multiple physicians has been possible.