Introduction
You trust modern medicine to heal your ailments, but history reveals a terrifying trail of treatments that often proved far deadlier than the diseases themselves. When illness struck in the past, you might have been prescribed toxic metals, addictive poisons, or brutal surgical interventions by well-meaning physicians. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen argue that these historical atrocities were not the work of malicious quacks alone, but mainstream medical practices backed by the cutting-edge science of their day.
The book traces the evolution of these bizarre therapies across eras of profound ignorance and desperation. You will explore how poisons became panaceas, how invasive trauma masqueraded as healing, and how commercial interests capitalized on human suffering.
- Which lethal metals did doctors prescribe for centuries?
- How did radioactive substances become popular consumer products?
- What drove physicians to perform brutal surgeries without anesthesia?
1. Toxic Metals and Poisons
Physicians for centuries prescribed lethal heavy metals like mercury, antimony, and arsenic based on humoral theories of purging and bodily balance.
Mercury and Calomel
Calomel, a mercury-containing compound, was widely used from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries as a powerful cathartic based on humoral theories of purging the body. Physicians believed that violently emptying the bowels and inducing massive salivation would eliminate toxins and balance the body's humors. This led to severe heavy metal toxicity symptoms, including lost teeth, rotting jaws, and neurological disorders.
Infants were given teething powders containing calomel, such as Dr. Moffett's Teethina Powder, leading to an affliction then called Pink's Disease or acrodynia.
Lewis and Clark brought 600 of Dr. Rush's Thunderbolts pills on their expedition, using heroic depletion therapy during the 1793 mosquito-borne Yellow Fever virus outbreak in Philadelphia, where Dr. Rush's patients suffered a 46 percent fatality rate and a baby's fever reached 102 degrees.
Mercury was used for centuries as the primary treatment for syphilis, resulting in agonizing regimens and horrific side effects. Sufferers of the Great Pox were subjected to steam baths, unctions rubbed into sores, and bodily fumigations where liquid mercury was vaporized under a seated box, yielding copious salivation and further physical decay.
Famous violinist Niccolò Paganini likely suffered from mercury toxicity after being diagnosed with syphilis, experiencing uncontrollable shaking, tooth loss, and inflamed testicles before his death while chronically expectorating three or four saucerfuls of mucus and pus.
Antimony and Arsenic
Antimony, a toxic metalloid, was prized for millennia to induce violent vomiting and purging under the belief that it would rebalance bodily humors. Healers believed that introducing poisons like antimony could reverse digestion and cleanse the body of impurities, despite causing severe liver damage, pancreatic inflammation, and death.
Author Oliver Goldsmith insisted on taking St. James's Fever Powder containing antimony to cure his fever, leading to eighteen hours of vomiting and convulsions before his death in 1774, long after antimony was used as an emetic starting in 3000 bce and Londoners paid 50 shillings for an antimony cup in 1637.
Arsenic was known as the king of poisons and inheritance powder because it was undetectable, lethal, and widely used for both murder and medicine. White arsenic was frequently used in food or drink to eliminate rivals or family members due to its tasteless nature and symptoms mimicking food poisoning, while also being broadly prescribed in solutions for skin ailments and fevers.
Mary Frances Creighton used arsenic to poison her mother-in-law, her teenage brother Charles, and later Ada Appelgate, though she operated in an era when arsenic was common in everyday products, including 100 million square feet of arsenic-infused wallpaper in England by the mid-1800s, 150 years of Fowler's Solution reigning as a known arsenical medicine since 1786, and a lethal 100 mg dose of arsenic that renders a victim dead within several hours.
A population of villagers in Styria consumed increasing doses of arsenic on purpose, believing it granted endurance, sexual appetite, and robust health. Known as toxiphagi, these villagers built up a tolerance to what would otherwise be lethal doses of arsenic, though stopping the practice triggered severe withdrawal symptoms and sometimes hideous deaths.
A Styrian milkmaid took arsenic to increase her charms for a lover, steadily increasing her dosage until she died a painful death from poisoning, following the practice reported in 1851 by Swiss physician Johann Jakob von Tschudi where villagers started with one-half grain, or about 30 milligrams, consumed a few times a week before reaching eight grains, or about 500 milligrams, representing lethal doses.
Gold was consumed for centuries in various forms by alchemists and physicians seeking immortality, health cordials, and cures for alcoholism. Pure gold passes through the human body inertly, but alchemists discovered how to dissolve it using harsh acid mixtures to create gold chloride salts, which were highly toxic and caused kidney damage and auric fever.
Dr. Leslie E. Keeley founded a sanatorium in Dwight, Illinois, where he treated alcohol and opium addicts with injections and a tonic that proudly advertised gold as a key ingredient, touting a staggering 95 percent cure rate, even as Eugene Lane was found drunk and arrested in 1893 after completing an alcoholism treatment program following the legacy of knowledge from 2500 bce China regarding gold's resistance to corrosion and alchemist Geber dissolving gold in liquid around 1300 ce.
2. Radium, Opiates, and Strychnine
Dangerous radioactive elements, addictive opiates, and toxic plant alkaloids were aggressively marketed as safe everyday remedies and performance enhancers.
Radioactive Cures
Patent medicines containing radioactive elements were heavily promoted and consumed as cure-alls before their devastating biological consequences were understood. Manufacturers sold radioactive patent waters containing radium isotopes that accumulated in the bones and caused severe radiation poisoning, massive tissue necrosis, and bone decay. Doctors even received a 17 percent kickhead for prescribing Radithor, which guaranteed two microcuries of radium in each bottle starting in 1927.
Industrialist Eben Byers consumed fifteen hundred bottles of Radithor over several years, leading to multiple cancers, bone destruction, and his death in 1932 at ninety-two pounds, requiring burial in a lead-lined coffin.
Quack medical devices claimed to revitalize aging bodies by directly irradiating the endocrine system with gamma rays. Inventors marketed gold-plated harnesses and wearable apparatuses containing radium designed to emit ionizing radiation into the glands to increase hormone production and reverse senescence. William Bailey invented the Radiendocrinator, a gold-plated radium harness worn over various body parts including under the scrotum in a special jockstrap.
Opiates and Stimulants
Giving opiate-laced syrups and cordials to calm crying infants and induce sleep was an accepted childcare practice for millennia. Caretakers routinely administered preparations containing morphine or opium to silence teething pain, colic, or sleeplessness, which often resulted in dangerous addiction, respiratory depression, or death. Mothers and wet nurses gave children patent medicines such as Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup or Godfrey’s Cordial to keep them quiet while adults worked, long after Sumerians referred to the opium poppy as Hul Gil in 3400 bce.
The extraction and chemical modification of active opiate compounds created vastly more potent drugs initially marketed as non-addictive cures. Chemists isolated morphine and subsequently synthesized diacetylmorphine, promoting these substances as safe pain relievers and miracle treatments for addiction before their catastrophic abuse potential became undeniable. Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner extracted morphine in 1806, and Charles Romley Alder Wright synthesized diacetylmorphine in London in 1874.
Bayer Laboratories commercially manufactured heroin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an over-the-counter remedy for coughs and asthma while claiming it possessed no danger of habit formation. By 1899, Bayer began synthesizing a ton of heroin annually, contributing to a landscape where United States opioid deaths eventually reached thirty-three thousand by 2015.
Extremely toxic plant alkaloids were used as athletic performance enhancers and medical stimulants under the false belief that they provided safe energy. Strychnine acts as a short-term nervous system stimulant in minute doses, but larger amounts rapidly block glycine function and cause agonizing, fatal muscle spasms and convulsions. Dr. Pierre Fouquier began investigating the medical potential of strychnine in 1811, building on the use of Strychnos nux-vomica.
American distance runner Thomas Hicks was given multiple doses of strychnine mixed with egg brandy by his trainers during the 1904 Olympic marathon, nearly killing him. He received an initial strychnine dose of 1 milligram, well below the 5 milligrams required to produce fatal poisoning.
3. Tobacco, Cocaine, and Earth
Spanish explorers and early European physicians embraced tobacco for its healing properties, employing it as an antidiarrheal, purgative, emollient, and wound healer. Nicolas Monardes claimed it could cure over twenty diseases, including cancer.
Society embraced tobacco, cocaine, and medicinal clays as universal panaceas while forming lucrative commercial alliances between merchants and physicians.
In the sixteenth century, French ambassador Jean Nicot promoted tobacco ointment for tumors and tobacco snuff to cure headaches, converting Queen Catherine de' Medici and the French court.
Substances as Medicine
In the eighteenth century, British physicians used tobacco smoke enemas as a sanctioned method to resuscitate drowned victims. Doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan founded a rescue brigade on the River Thames that used tobacco smoke enema kits equipped with bellows to warm victims and stimulate respiration.
Rescuers pulled apparently drowned people from the Thames, stripped them, placed an enema tube into the rectum, and pumped smoke using a fumigator and bellows.
Faced with emerging health concerns in the early twentieth century, the tobacco industry forged marketing alliances with physicians to maintain consumer trust. Tobacco companies used independent surveys and offered free cigarette cartons to doctors in exchange for testimonials, creating prominent advertising campaigns featuring physicians.
R. J. Reynolds launched the "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette" campaign based on a survey conducted by its own subsidiary, William Esty Co., while 20,679 physicians claimed Luckies were less irritating in a historical advertisement. In 1955, 50 percent of the adult male population smoked and 30 percent of doctors reported smoking at least a pack a day. Today, tobacco is directly responsible for 6 million deaths each year worldwide.
Cocaine was widely extracted and utilized in late nineteenth-century tonics, wines, and patent medicines as a stimulant, local anesthetic, and painkiller. Following its isolation by Albert Niemann, cocaine was championed by figures like Sigmund Freud and incorporated into commercial products to treat various physical ailments.
John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola as an alcoholic, cocaine-laced alternative to morphine and French coca wine, containing 1/400th of a grain of cocaine per ounce of syrup in 1905, while Angelo Mariani reaped a fortune from Vin Mariani, which featured 10 percent alcohol and 8 percent cocaine extract.
Antidotes and Earth
Sealed medicinal clay known as terra sigillata was historically harvested and used across Europe as a universal antidote to poison. Clay acts as an absorbent in the digestive tract, slowing down the absorption of toxins, but historical usage relied heavily on religious rituals, priestly seals, and placebo effects.
In 1581, a condemned robber named Wendel Thumblardt was forced to ingest a lethal dose of mercury sublimate, but survived after being treated with Andreas Berthold's terra sigillata tablets, following a tradition where Galen took 20,000 such tablets back to Rome in 167 ce.
Before modern pharmacology, human societies relied on elaborate animal and mineral antidotes, such as bezoars, unicorn horns, and pearl powder, to combat poisons. Royalty and the wealthy invested in rare animal stones and complex herbal mixtures like theriac and Mithridates' antidote, often combining genuine chemical properties with magical thinking.
King Mithridates VI of Pontus ingested daily doses of various poisons and venomous animal parts to build immunity, becoming so unpoisonable that he ultimately had to ask a guard to stab him, relying on a Mithridatic antidote composed of 54 ingredients according to Pliny the Elder, or the 70 ingredients in theriac created by Andromachus.
4. Bloodletting, Lobotomy, and Trauma
Aggressive interventions like massive bloodletting, skull trepanning, ice-pick lobotomies, and intentional cautery were used to expel disease from the body.
Bloodletting and Surgery
Ancient practitioners believed that purging excess blood, phlegm, or bile would restore balance. Over time, doctors drastically overestimated human blood volume and removed massive amounts of blood, causing severe anemia, fatigue, and death.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was bled of more than four pints of blood in his last week of life. George Washington may have lost five to nine pints of blood before dying after catching a bad cold. Dr. Benjamin Rush suffered a 200 percent overestimation of human blood volume during these heroic depletion therapy procedures.
Following a 1163 papal decree forbidding the clergy from performing surgery or shedding blood, European barbers took over medical services like bloodletting, cupping, and boil draining. Barbers placed bowls of blood on their windowsills to attract customers until laws required them to dispose of the blood directly into the River Thames. The red, white, and blue barber pole symbolizes the tourniquet, vein, and blood.
Trauma and Enemas
Trepanning is the oldest recorded surgical procedure, involving boring or scraping holes into the skull to treat everything from skull fractures to mental illness. Practiced since Mesolithic times, it dates back to 8000 to 10000 bce on early skulls. It had a 50 percent mortality rate for trepanning in pre-antisepsis Europe.
In 1965, Dutchman Bart Huges used an electric drill, knife, and hypodermic needle to trepan his own skull in an attempt to reach a higher state of consciousness.
Psychosurgery evolved from injecting alcohol into the frontal lobes to mechanical destruction using leucotomes and kitchen ice picks. In the late 1930s, the US held four hundred thousand institutionalized mentally ill patients. Walter Freeman later modified the procedure into the transorbital lobotomy, using an ice pick tapped through the orbital bone to scramble frontal lobe tissue without needing an operating room.
Howard Dully was only twelve years old when his stepmother had him lobotomized. Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized in 1941 at the request of her father Joe Kennedy to manage her behavioral outbursts, leaving her institutionalized and unable to walk or speak normally.
Physicians used actual cautery and blistering agents to cause intentional trauma based on the theory of counterirritation, drawing disease away from the core problem. A twelfth-century physician recommended twenty burns all over the body for swelling. An 1800s London dispensary recipe combined one pound of beetle powder with wax and lard. Ambroise Paré discovered by accident that gunshot wounds healed much better when left un-cauterized rather than treated with boiling oil.
Enemas were used extensively for centuries to treat a wide array of illnesses based on the false theory of autointoxication, which held that retained feces produced poisons and disease. King Louis XIV reportedly enjoyed two thousand clyster treatments in his lifetime. Charles A. Tyrrell marketed the J. B. L. Cascade system, a five-quart internal bath device.
5. Water Cures, Surgery, and Animals
Hydropathic shocks, lightning-fast amputations, unhygienic operating theaters, and medical leeches dominated nineteenth-century clinical practices.
Hydrotherapy and Surgery
The nineteenth-century cold water cure popularized basic hygiene principles like regular bathing and hydration, but frequently escalated into extreme and uncomfortable procedures. Vincenz Priessnitz founded the Gräfenburg sanitarium in 1826 after curing his own severe injuries with cold compresses and drinking water. This inspired European hydropathic institutes to use intense treatments like wet sheets, wet dresses, and freezing cold showers to shock the body back to health.
Charles Darwin visited a hydropathic institute to treat his chronic mysterious ailments and noted that the treatments delightfully dulled his brain so he stopped thinking about species evolution.
Asylum physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used aggressive hydrotherapy techniques to punish, restrain, and supposedly shock the madness out of psychiatric patients. Doctors applied cold water pours, continuous hot baths lasting weeks, and high-pressure water jets directed at the head or genitals to control deranged patients, exhaust them into compliance, or treat female hysteria. A French physician described the pelvic douche used on female patients in 1843, noting that the resulting physical flush and equilibrium created such an agreeable sensation that practitioners had to strictly limit sessions to four or five minutes.
Before reliable anesthesia, surgeons prioritized extreme speed during amputations to minimize patient trauma, which frequently compromised precision and hygiene. Surgeons executed amputations in mere minutes using guillotine cuts, but this speed led to sloppy surgical work, protruding bones, and accidental injuries to assistants or patients. Scottish surgeon Robert Liston performed amputations in under three minutes, achieving a disastrous 300 percent mortality rate during a single surgery when he accidentally amputated a patient's testicles, severed an assistant's fingers, and caused a spectator to die of sheer terror.
Nineteenth-century operating theaters were intentionally filthy until germ theory forced the adoption of handwashing, antiseptics, and sterilization. Surgeons routinely operated with unwashed hands and blood-caked coats as a badge of honor, transferring fatal infections from autopsies to maternity and surgical wards until Ignaz Semmelweis and Joseph Lister introduced chlorine handwashing and carbolic acid antisepsis. Medical students at the Vienna General Hospital brought unwashed hands directly from autopsies to the obstetrics ward, killing one out of three mothers until Semmelweis enforced chlorine handwashing, causing death rates to plummet.
Victorian and early twentieth-century surgeons frequently performed radical, invasive, and pointless operations to cure non-surgical conditions like stuttering, stroke, and mental illness. Surgeons excised tongues for stuttering, tied off carotid arteries for strokes, removed colons for constipation, and performed nephropexy to tack up dropped kidneys, causing severe complications and deaths. British surgeon Sir William Arbuthnot Lane performed more than a thousand colectomies, mostly on women, believing that a slow colon caused mental shortcomings like stupidity, headaches, and irritability.
Anesthesia and Leechcraft
Early pioneers of surgical anesthesia developed their methods through dangerous self-experimentation, animal asphyxiation, and heavy recreational drug use. Physicians tested toxic gases and solvents on animals and themselves, leading to discoveries of carbon dioxide asphyxiation, chloroform, nitrous oxide, and ether, despite severe risks of cardiac arrest, addiction, and explosion. Henry Hill Hickman tested suspended animation by suffocating puppies under glass covers to amputate their ears without pain, earning severe condemnation from medical journals.
Medical leeches were heavily used for centuries to bleed patients and rebalance humors, utilizing specialized biological features to feed painlessly and target specific body parts. Medical leeches possess three jaws with around three hundred total teeth leaving a Mercedes-Benz shaped mark, along with saliva containing local anesthetics and the blood thinner hirudin to ensure continuous blood flow. Physicians applied leeches directly inside the body using grooved metal rods to treat internal conditions like anal inflammation and cervical menstrual pain.
To use leeches successfully, you must follow specific handling rules:
- Shave the skin cleanly before applying leeches to prevent prickly hairs from annoying them.
- Dunk leeches in dark beer or diluted wine, or bathe the skin in milk, sugar water, or fresh blood to encourage vigorous biting.
- Sprinkle table salt over the leech head after fifteen minutes to safely remove it without skin trauma.
The nineteenth-century demand for leeches sparked a massive global import market and disgusting farming practices, whereas modern medicine uses synthesized leech proteins and live leeches for microsurgery. European demand reached tens of millions of leeches annually, leading to hirudiculture farms using wounded livestock. Today, live leeches are utilized in reconstructive surgery to decompress blood-engorged tissues, and synthesized hirudin serves as an anticoagulant.
10 Key Ideas
- Physicians for centuries prescribed lethal heavy metals like mercury, antimony, and arsenic based on humoral theories of purging and bodily balance.
- Dangerous radioactive elements, addictive opiates, and toxic plant alkaloids were aggressively marketed as safe everyday remedies and performance enhancers.
- Society embraced tobacco, cocaine, and medicinal clays as universal panaceas while forming lucrative commercial alliances between merchants and physicians.
- Aggressive interventions like massive bloodletting, skull trepanning, ice-pick lobotomies, and intentional cautery were used to expel disease from the body.
- Hydropathic shocks, lightning-fast amputations, unhygienic operating theaters, and medical leeches dominated nineteenth-century clinical practices.
- Calomel and toxic heavy metal treatments inflicted severe neurological disorders, tooth loss, and fatal toxicities across populations ranging from infants to explorers.
- Commercial patent medicines containing radium and addictive opiates like heroin were widely distributed as harmless cure-alls before their destructive biological impacts became undeniable.
- Historical medical practices integrated dangerous substances into everyday life, from arsenic-eating villagers and cocaine tonics to physicians actively endorsing cigarette brands.
- Extreme surgical and physical interventions, including trepanning, massive bloodletting, unmitigated amputations, and radical colectomies, frequently caused staggering mortality rates.
- The transition from historical quackery to modern evidence-based science eventually replaced brutal therapies like unhygienic surgery, toxic metal purges, and uncontrolled leechcraft with targeted pharmacological and antiseptic standards.