12 Crazy Medical Practices From The Past

Modern medicine may not be perfect, but it's sure come a long way. It's pretty amazing that if something hurts, we can just go to the store and pick up some medicine that will make the pain go away. It wasn't always that simple, though. In fact, many of the medical practices of yesteryear weren't just ineffective, they were also downright dangerous.

It's not exactly a secret that life today is a lot easier (and more sanitary) than it was a few hundred years ago. These gag-worthy sanitary practices are enough to make many of us queasy just by reading about them, but imagine how horrible it must have been to actually live like this every day! I'm sure glad I was born in this era instead.

While our ancestors weren't necessarily the best at helping people, they were pretty good at hurting people. These execution methods seem utterly barbaric today, but in the past, they were pretty standard for people who committed a crime. Thank goodness so many of them were outlawed before we were born!

If you ever get frustrated that your cold medicine isn't working as well as you want it to, reading about these terrifying medical practices from the past is sure to make you appreciate the hospitals and treatments of today. I can't believe anyone ever thought that number 7 was a good idea!

According to some scholars, elderly Arabian men once offered up their bodies as sacrifices to help heal others in the future. They would eat nothing but honey and even bathe in it, eventually dying from malnutrition. Their corpses were then placed in tombs filled with honey for another century. Eventually, their bodies were sold to be eaten by other people, as they were thought to be a cure for bone problems.

Thank goodness for today's version of cough medicine! Back in 1728, doctors spoke of removing the shells of garden snails, slitting their bodies, and hanging them up inside a bag full of sugar to let their mucus drip through. While disgusting, the slime and sugar probably did help to coat a scratchy throat.

After fancy wigs went out of style, many men tried to grow their real hair back by rubbing a mixture of potassium and chicken poo into their scalps. It… didn't work.

These days, we have things like anesthesia to help in treating cases of painful hemorrhoids. In the past, though, doctors just used a hot cautery iron to seal things back up after the blood was drained from their patients' hemorrhoids. "Ouch" is probably an understatement.

If you got a toothache in the 15th century, your doctor probably assumed it was due to worms living in your teeth. The "cure" was to light a candle and hold it in your open mouth until it filled with smoke, then lean over a bowl of water so all the "worms" would fall into it.

Malaria is a horrible illness distributed by mosquitoes that kills millions of people every year. But one doctor discovered that malaria wasn't all bad. Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg discovered in the 1920s that fevers caused by malaria can reach such high temperatures that they kill the bacteria that cause syphilis. Thankfully, we now have better ways of treating this STI.

These days, no one in their right mind would consume tapeworm eggs just to drop weight, but that's what was done in the past. Tapeworms are known for making people thin because they eat all the nutrients that you consume, but they also cause lots of health problems and can, ironically, make you look bloated.

Not only was urine once used to clean wounds, but wine was also a common antiseptic.

We now know that mercury is an extremely toxic metal, but way back when, doctors used it to "cure" just about everything. Wounds would have mercury rubbed on them, people would ingest mercury to cure common illnesses, and it was even used to (supposedly) get rid of STDs.

In the past, it was thought that all you needed to be cured of any illness was to get rid of the "bad blood." So leeches were brought in to suck it out of people. As you might expect, a good number of people died of blood loss from this creepy practice.

In the middle of the 20th century, doctors would deprive schizophrenic patients' brains of glucose before giving them a high-dose glucose injection. The idea was to calm the patient, but it only had that effect because it was seriously damaging the brain, often resulting in death.

Before the time of epidurals, there was eagle poop. Doctors mixed it into a poultice to help women who were giving birth, as it was said to help ease the pain. Somehow, I doubt that it made too much of a difference.

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