The Dark Side of Medicine: From Tobacco Smoke Enemas to Heroin Cough Medicine

Welcome to Strange History, where we explore the weird and the wonderful history that

has shaped the world into what it is today. Strange History is proudly part

of the Darkcast podcast network hosted on Spreaker. Go check out all the amazing

podcasts there. Today, we delve into five strange medical techniques from history.

For modern medicine, there were some insanely barbaric ways of treating certain ailments.

Let's start out with the one about assholes, because why not. The tobacco

smoke enema and the late seventeen hundreds, tobacco started to arrive on English shores

from the Americas. Along with it came the idea that, when used as

an enema, tobacco smoke could cure a wide range of ailments. As the

name suggests, a tobacco smoke enema involves literally blowing smoke up the patient's rectum,

the so called pipe smoker. London medic would use this technique on those

who fell into the River Thames and were near drowned. Tobacco smoke enemas were

thought to both warm the patient from within and stimulate respiration. The Royal Human

Society left resuscitation kits, including the equipment necessary to carry out tobacco enema at

certain points along the river. Could you imagine walking down the Thames. Nobody

is around but one drunk baffoon. He slips into the murky depths, and

there you have to decide. You pretend you didn't see the lush fall,

or you take one for the team we call humanity and blow smoke up his

ass. I'm on the fence here, honestly. One particularly graphic description from

seventeen forty six is described in a paper published in the Lancet. A man's

wife was pulled from the water, apparently dead. It says, amid much

conflicting advice, a passing sailor preferred his pipe and instruct the husband to insert

the stem into the wife's erectum, cover the bowl with a piece of perforate

paper, and blow hard. Miraculously the woman revived. My guest, as

this couple had a very special relationship. After this was over, honey,

get me dinner. The wife says she's tired, and the husband quickly reminds

her of who blew up her ass to keep her alive. Anyway. Word

of their benefits quickly spread and people were soon using tobacco smoke animals to treat

everything from headaches and abdominal cramps to thyroid and cholera. As people were using

the tobacco enima to treat increasingly serious diseases, the danger to the medics also

increased. Imagine that somebody who smoked a pipe was instantly considered a medic.

For instance, if a practitioner would accidentally breathe in rather than blow out,

perhaps stirring about of tobacco induced coughing cholera, flaglets could pass into their lungs

and inflict them fatally. Thankfully, the introduction of bellows made the job slightly

less hazardous. In the early eighteen hundreds, tobacco was shown to cause damage

to the heart, and the tobacco enema fad thankfully began to decline. The

next thing we're going to talk about is cutting teeth literally. In the old

days informortality was sky high, and much of the time the reason for death

was wholly unknown. Children frequently died at six months to two years of age,

which coincidentally around the time, which coincidentally was around the time their first

teeth were coming through the medical minds of the day thought this might not be

a simple coincidence, so they concluded that the process of teething was also causing

infant death. In England Wales. In eighteen thirty nine, for instance,

over five thousand deaths were attributed to teething. Even by nineteen ten the figure

was still sixteen hundred. So how to physicians combat the evils of teething?

Unfortunately for those children involved, They developed a wide array of inventions, including

bleeding, blistering, placing leeches on the gums, and in some case they

even burned the back of baby's head. During the sixth seenth century, French

surgeon Ambrose Parr introduced gum lancing, and this became the preferred method. A

paper published in The Lancet explained just how popular lancing baby's gums became. John

Hunter would lance a baby's gum up to ten times. Jay Maryan Sims treated

his first patient, a baby of eighteen months old. As soon as I

saw some swelling of the gums, I at once took out my lancet and

cut the guns down to the teeth, the author continues. The physician Marshall

Hall wrote that he would rather lance a child's gums one hundred and ninety nine

times unnecessarily than omit it once if necessary, and he instructed his students to

do it before, during, and after the teeth appeared, and sometimes twice

a day. It is yet unknown how many children died from infections that likely

developed following such procedures. Lancing petered out, but it did not disappear for

a surprisingly long time. Even as late as nineteen thirty eight, a dentistry

book offers instructions for gun lancing a teething child. If nothing else, this

chapter is a reminder of how barbaric humans can be without the slightest intention of

being so. With this being said, they do not do this anymore.

That they say, because when my son was teething very badly when he was

a baby, his gums were very red and swollen. He was running fever

after fever. Our pediatrician actually did this, and honestly it worked. Disclaimer,

Please do not do this to your kids. The third thing we're going

to be talking about is improving your smile in a very cheap way. Today,

urine has very few everyday uses, which is a shame considering its wide

availability in Roman times. However, it was a different story. Urine was

such a popular commodity that people collected it from public urinals, and there was

even a tax to pay for those who profited from the sale of this golden

liquid. Many of urin's uses were non medical, such as the production of

gunpowder or to even softened leather. One less savory used for urine, however,

was as a tooth whitener. The ammonia allegedly helps clear teeth of their

stains. I imagine it would do nothing to reduce morning breath, though apparently

leaving the air into festa for some time gives the area time to convert into

an ammonia, which is an antibacterial and bleaching agent used in household cleaning products.

It was not only the ancient Romans who used this teeth whitening method.

Throughout history has been used by a number of people, and even today some

are tempted to give it a try. No, we do not recommend this

as an intervention. The fourth thing we're going to be talking about is stone

age brain surgery, or tree panning. In short, tree panning is the

process of boring a hole into somebody's skull. It sounds as brutal as it

is scientists of unearthed goals bearing telltale holes from the Neolithic period onward. Many

consider tree panning the earliest surgery for which there is archaeological evidence. Tree panning

was popular two an incredible five to ten percent of all Neolithic skulls that scientists

have so far dug up. They're all the unmistakable marks of tree panning fromature

remains. Is not always possible to tell whether the surgery was carried out before

or after death, but some patients were certainly alive. Against all odds,

some ancient patients managed to survive the process. We know this because the skulls

show evidence of healing that had occurred afterwards. Though most carried out on adult

males, scientists have also found tree panning holes in the skulls of women and

children during Neolithic times. The practice was perhaps surprisingly widespread from a period when

a long distance travel and the exchange of ideas was limited. Experts of unearthed

skulls bearing the marks of tree panning in Europe, Siberia, China, and

the Americas. It was all the rage. Apparently, tree panning did not

die out with the Stone Age, carried on through the Classical period and even

as far as the Renaissance. Today, similar surgical procedures still exists, but

as you might imagine, they involve a little more finesse and a lot more

anesthesia. For instance, specialists used craniotomies to treat some hematomas where blood builds

up between the skull and the brain and the membranes in between. The fifth

and final medical strangeness that we're going to talk about is heroin. In quof

medicine, cloths are common, annoying, and can ruin your day. Because

of this, scientists have designed various concoctions over the centuries toward them off.

However, it became increasingly clear that quough medicines do very little, if anything,

to sue a cough. One concoction that German drug company bay Or marketed

held a particularly potent ingredient, heroine. The inclusion of this highly addictive substance

was meant to replace opium, which would become a popular drug of abuse.

This over the counter drug was promoted as including a non addictive morphine substitute,

although it soon became clear that heroine was incredibly addictive too. The drug was

marketed from eighteen ninety eight to nineteen ten in nineteen twenty four, though the

Food and Drug Administration banned heroin from being sold, imported, and manufactured.

The question is that heroin worked any better than the modern over the counter coughts

presence, it appears not. That brings us to the end of today's medical

horrors. Imagine in one hundred years, we will look back and some things,

well probably a lot of the things that we do today will be considered

barbaric as well. Humans are excellent at assuming they have finally got it all

worked out what we never do. Join us next time as we uncover more

strange and mysterious stories than the annals of history. This episode was produced by

the amazing Dead to Me Productions, and we're proudly hosted on Spreaker from my

Heart. Keep being Strange and see you next week. Nerds. Peace out, yay.

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