5 Scary Medical Treatments in Colonial America
Human urine, pig dung, and bug parts? In seventeenth-century America, the medical treatments prescribed by doctors sometimes caused more harm than the illnesses they were intended to cure. Ranging from bizarre to just plain gross, these procedures will make your next flu shot seem like a walk in the park.
Treatment #1: Bleeding
Used to treat: scarlet fever, flu, sore throat, infections, and various illnesses
Scared of needles? They're nothing compared to lancets. Seventeenth-century doctors would use these small knives to open a patient's vein, allowing a pint or even more of the patient's blood to flow into a basin. This centuries-old treatment was considered good medicine for a variety of ailments, including a run-of-the-mill fever, infections, and general listlessness. In a different, similarly bloody procedure, live leeches were placed on a patient's skin next to a wound to help speed up the healing. Although we now know that bloodletting with a lancet did absolutely no good (and probably caused a good deal of harm in most cases), modern researchers have discovered that treating patients with leeches actually helps improve blood circulation to a wound.
Treatment #2: Poison
Used to treat: scarlet fever, flu, sore throat, infections, and various other illnesses
Seventeenth-century doctors believed it was effective to empty out a sick person's digestive system—from both ends. The treatment? Poison. Many of the emetic and purgative medicines doctors used to induce vomiting or diarrhea contained substances that we'd classify as poisonous today. The most widely used medicine of the time, calomel, was actually mercury chloride—a toxic compound used today to kill fungi. Long-term exposure to its component element, mercury, damages the human nervous system and can cause mental illness. Another medicine, tartar emetic, contained the heavy metal antimony, which also poses a dire health risk.
Treatment #3: Bug powder
Used to treat: swollen glands, jaundice, and nosebleeds
Many seventeenth-century home remedies called for patients to eat, drink, or sniff bug parts. One such “cure” involved soaking a handful of pill bugs in white port wine for several days. After the bugs were strained out, the resulting solution was used in the treatment of swollen glands and for jaundice, a common liver disorder. For lung infections, people often turned to concoctions such as powdered millipedes in donkey's milk or pulverized crayfish in horse's milk. Nosebleeds were treated with spiders, which were tied up in a rag and sniffed.
Treatment #4: Hair of a virgin
Used to treat: labor pains and difficult childbirths
In colonial days, as many as two out of every 100 childbirths ended in the mother's death. If those odds don't sound terrible, consider that the average married woman could expect to have eight children. For difficult labors, a midwife might try to ease pain and speed up the delivery by taking the following steps:
Find a virgin at least half the age of the woman in labor.
Cut a lock of her hair.
Take twelve ant eggs, dry them, and grind them into a powder.
Combine ant egg powder with virgin hair, add milk, and serve!
Treatment #5: Excrement
Used to treat: nosebleeds, jaundice, palsy, and blisters
Warning: If you're squeamish, stop reading now. Still here? Okay, don't say we didn't warn you. Nosebleeds were sometimes treated with fresh pig dung rolled into two cone-shaped plugs and shoved up the nostrils. Human waste also featured in home remedies. One treatment for jaundice called for the patient to drink his or her own urine every morning and evening. One prominent seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts physician, Dr. Zerobabel Endecott, put his stamp of approval on the treatment when he wrote that the “volatile fat of urine” was effective in combating jaundice. Suffering from palsy (involuntary shaking)? Your doctor might have advised you to take a bath in hot urine and absinthe, a green-tinted alcoholic drink that is illegal in the United States today because of its potency.