The Most Bizarre Medical Treatments From the Past

Tapeworms, cocaine, and dead mice. Are these the types of medications you want in your toolkit?

Modern medicine as we know it today took a long time to get here, and along the way, there were some questionable practices and outright mistakes. Many of them are laughable today but were thought to be the latest, most progressive treatments at the time.

These are the strangest medical treatments from the past—you’ll never guess what dead mice were used for!

 

First up is malaria, and yes, malaria was the treatment. It was once believed that infecting someone with malaria could cure psychosis caused by advanced syphilis.

Malariotherapy, as it was called, was first hypothesized by Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who once witnessed one of his patients return to sanity after a bacterial infection caused a high fever. He believed that he could infect a syphilis patient with malaria, induce a high fever to treat their psychosis, and then cure the malaria with quinine.

He saw a 25% success rate, and for that, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927.

Unfortunately for Dr. Jauregg, but fortunately for humanity, Sir Arthur Fleming discovered a bacteria-killing mold called Penicillium notatum, leading to the creation of antibiotics and the discontinuation of malariotherapy. Evidently, patients preferred antibiotics to the boiling fevers and risk of death caused by malaria.

 

Next, we have tapeworms for weight loss. A tapeworm is a parasite that can live and feed inside human intestines, causing stomach pain, a loss of appetite, diarrhea, and vomiting. Due to these symptoms, people with this parasitic infection tend to lose weight.

Therefore, tapeworms have been marketed as a weight loss product for over 100 years, and in some circles, continue to be today, despite known health risks like meningitis, epilepsy, and dementia.

Desperate dieters would ingest ​​beef tapeworm cysts, also known as Cysticercus bovis, the Taenia saginata metacestode, usually in the form of a pill. The idea is that when the tapeworms reach maturity in the intestine, they will absorb food, causing weight loss, along with accompanying symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting.

Once the dieter had lost the weight they wanted, they would take an antiparasitic pill to, hopefully, kill off the tapeworms, which they would then need to excrete out their backside.

But this is easier said than done, as tapeworms can grow as large as 30 ft, or 9 meters. Understandably, this can cause some serious abdominal and rectal complications, as anyone who has ever tried to take a 9 meter poop can attest to.

 

And next we have cocaine. Not only was it once legal, it was also celebrated by doctors as a “wonder drug.”

Derived from the Coca plant, one of the oldest cultivated plants in South America, coca leaves were once chewed as a panacea and local anesthetic during the reign of the Incan Empire of Peru, and the leaves were also used in some religious ceremonies.

Hundreds of years later in Europe in 1860, German chemist Albert Nieman isolated cocaine from coca leaves and discovered the powdery substance made his tongue numb.

20 years later, Austrian ophthalmologist Carl Koller experimented with cocaine as a surgical anesthetic to be used while performing eye surgery. Ether and chloroform would have been used, but they caused patients to vomit—something that obviously can’t happen when operating on a patient’s eye.

Therefore, cataract surgery had to be performed without anesthesia, causing patients unbearable pain. That is until Koller started soaking his patients’ eyes in a cocaine solution and discovered his patients no longer experienced any pain during surgery. Unfortunately, enthusiasm for this surgical anesthetic diminished after the number of patients dying of accidental overdoses during surgery skyrocketed.

Around this same time, a certain famous psychiatrist discovered cocaine had other applications. In 1884, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, wrote a paper called “Uber Coca.” In the paper, Freud said that “One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work,” after ingesting cocaine.

Freud, along with other doctors and scientists, also postulated that cocaine could relieve symptoms of depression as well as cure someone’s dependence on alcohol or morphine, not realizing at the time that cocaine itself was addictive as well. Freud would go on using cocaine for 12 years, until almost killing a patient while under the influence in 1895.

An Anatomy of Addiction is one of my favorite books and covers not only Freud’s adventures with cocaine, but also Dr. William Halsted and his influence shaping early modern surgery in the US, as well as his medical uses for cocaine and cocaine addiction. 

 

Finally, we’ve reached dead mice. This one traces all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians, who believed in a number of questionable healthcare practices, including crocodile dung as a contraceptive, animal fat for hair loss, and bloodletting as a general cure-all—more on that next.

They also believed that dead mice could cure toothaches.

One simply had to take a dead mouse, mash it up into a paste, and place it on the aching tooth. Apparently, this would relieve the pain; though it’s possible that the taste and smell of rotting mice was simply distracting enough to make people forget about their aching teeth entirely.

At that time in Egypt, many people suffered from dental issues because of the sand present in so many of the foods. Teeth were often worn down, and exposed nerves could cause notable pain.

Dead mice were also ground up and mixed with other ingredients to cure earaches and other health conditions. But as I’m sure you can already guess, there are many additional problems that can arise from exposing an open wound to rotting animal flesh.

And if you’re thinking, well, that was a really, really long time ago, in the 1920s in rural England, doctors were still treating patients with remedies made from dead mice.

 

As promised, next is bloodletting. You may have heard of leeches being applied to someone in order to suck out diseased blood, but physicians didn’t only use leeches.

Bloodletting, which is removing blood from a patient in order to treat, cure, or prevent disease, is a medical practice that’s thousands of years old, dating back to Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece.

Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician and philosopher who you may recognize from the Hippocratic Oath, believed, like many at that time, that existence was represented by the four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Humans were related to those four basic humors through blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.

If someone was ill, it meant an imbalance of the four humors, so treatment involved restoring balance by removing some of the excessive humor.

Bloodletting became a main method of treatment for all manner of ailments when Galen of Pergamum said blood was the most dominant humor during the 2nd century. Galen believed blood was consumed by the body as nourishment, like food, and not circulated. Therefore, the removal of blood was not considered harmful or dangerous.

Physicians regularly performed bloodletting themselves using lancets and fleams, which were small, sharp blades doctors could carry in their pockets. Many ounces of blood could be removed at a time by a physician or as a home remedy.

The procedure was even used to treat mental illness. Controversial physician Dr Benjamin Rush performed aggressive bloodletting on patients suffering from mental illness, as he believed it would calm down vascular overexcitement.

Galen and future physicians also advocated for the use of leeches to extract the diseased blood.

During the 1800s, Dr François Broussais claimed that placing several leeches over the organ he thought was inflamed cured his patients. His brand of leech therapy was very popular in Europe, especially in France, where 5 to 6 million leeches were used per year in Paris alone and about 35 million in France as a whole.

Bloodletting eventually fell out of favor.

However, leech therapy is actually still used today, primarily in the area of microsurgery and reimplantation sur­gery. Hirudo medicinalis, also known as medicinal leeches, secrete several biologically active substances, including fibrinase, proteinase inhibitors, hyaluronidase, and hirudin, an anticoagulant, reducing venous congestion and preventing tissue necrosis.

This means leeches can be beneficial in the postoperative care of skin grafts and microsurgical procedures, like reimplanted fingers or certain types of breast reconstruction. Leech therapy also reduces the symptoms of eczema and psoriasis.

Due to the concern of secondary infections as a result of live leeches, the University of Wisconsin developed a “mechanical leech” in the early 2000s.

 

Next is lobotomies, which you may remember from the ending of the famous book and subsequent film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

A lobotomy is a surgical procedure in which the nerve pathways in on or more lobes of the brain are severed from lobes in other areas. This archaic and radical surgical practice was used as a therapeutic measure to help alleviate symptoms of severe mental illness in self-destructive, delusional, or violent patients.

Evidence that lobotomies could calm severely mentally ill patients surfaced in the 1880s when Swiss physician and insane asylum supervisor Gottlieb Burkhardt began experimenting on patients suffering from auditory hallucinations and other symptoms of mental illness.

However, few physicians adopted this practice until 1935, when Portuguese neurophysician António Egas Moniz and surgeon Pedro Almeida Lima drilled two holes in a patient’s head and then injected pure ethyl alcohol into their prefrontal cortex. Alcohol was used to interrupt the neuronal tracts that, at the time, were thought to inspire and reinforce the destructive chronic patterns of thought witnessed in mentally ill patients.

By 1937, Moniz and Lima had operated on nearly 40 patients with mixed results. However, this didn’t stop American neurologists Walter J. Freeman and James W. Watts from further refining the procedure in the late 1930s and promoting its success as a miracle procedure through the American media.

In 1945, Freeman created the transorbital lobotomy. He would force a picklike instrument through the back of a patient’s eye sockets to pierce the thin bone that separates the orbits from the frontal lobes. He would then insert the pick’s point into the frontal lobe to sever connections in the brain.

While the procedure did appear to alleviate agitation and tension in patients, it also left many apathetic and passive, with reduced concentration and emotional depth. Some also died as a result of the procedure. However, these deaths were not widely reported, and António Egas Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Despite being widely and heavily criticized by American neurosurgeons, tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the US during the 1940s and 1950s. Freeman himself supervised 3500 of them during his career.

The procedure’s popularity waned in the 1950s, however, when it was discovered that antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other medication did a much better, and much less intrusive, job of managing mental health symptoms in patients.

 

Lastly, there was a time not so long ago when doctors cited smoking cigarettes as a treatment for asthma. Yes, you heard that right; doctors in the early 1900s said inhaling cigarette smoke could relieve symptoms of asthma.

But it doesn’t stop there. Before the long-term dangers were known, during the 1930s to the 1950s, physicians were often brand ambassadors for cigarette companies, prescribing them as a digestive aid and cure for anxiety.

Many ad campaigns were created featuring doctors advocating for one cigarette brand over the other, with quotes like “20,679 physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating,’” or “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”

It makes you wonder what modern treatments and habits people will think are strange and archaic 60 years from now.

Looking at you, vapes.