Before COVID-19, modern medicine in developed countries looked clean and clinical. But throughout history, medicine was often unrefined, messy, and downright disgusting. With plagues and diseases common, people weren’t squeamish. Nature tried to kill you, and doctors tried to get nature on their side. Centuries ago, practices later called magic were suggested by Europe’s educated men.
The Wound Salve
One strange early modern treatment was smearing ointment on the weapon, not the wound. This ‘sympathetic magic’ was supported by Walter Ralegh and Kenelm Digby. Chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont advised making the salve with ‘moss of an unburied cranium; the fat of man, each two ounces; mummy, human blood each half an ounce,’ and ‘oil of linseed, and turpentine, each one ounce.’
Francis Bacon mentioned a variation needing ‘the fat of two bears, killed in the act of generation’. One had to sneak up on amorous bears and judge the exact moment of mutual orgasm to kill them. The Wound Salve may have worked because surgeons didn’t touch the patient and transmit germs.
Cerebral Pâté
This treatment for epilepsy was prescribed by John French, a 17th-century chemist and doctor. One should ‘take the brains of a young man that hath died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, veins, nerves, [and] all the pith of the back,’ and ‘bruise these in a stone mortar til they become a kind of pap’. Then pour ‘as much of the spirit of wine, as will cover it three or four fingers breadth’ over it, and let it ‘digest … half a year in horse dung’ before distilling.
French was an anatomist and dissected at Savoy Hospital, easily obtaining human heads. In 2011, Tony Robinson and I made French’s medicine for television using pig. It was more like soup than cerebral pâté. We skipped the horse dung.
The Homunculus
In 1650, A New Light of Alchemy had this recipe: ‘Let the sperm of a man by itself be putrefied in a gourd glass, sealed up, with the highest degree of putrefaction in horse dung, for the space of forty days…until it begin to be alive… After this time it will be something like a man, yet transparent, and without a body…nourished and fed with the arcanum of man’s blood…forty weeks kept in…horse-dung, it will become a true, and living infant.’
Paracelsus said to call it Homunculus, or Artificial Man, and raise it with great care. Though Paracelsus died in 1541, some 17th-century scientists took the homunculus seriously.
Skull Smoothie
In the 1660s, an English doctor suggested a chocolate mixture rich in calcium for apoplexy. It contained ‘the powder of the root of the male peony’ mixed with human skull, ambergris, and musk. Add ‘of the kernels of the cocoa nuts one pound’, and ‘of sugar what will suffice’; and ‘of this make chocolate’, taking ‘half an ounce or six drams every morning in a draught of the decoction of sage or of the flowers of peony’.
The doctor was Thomas Willis, the Father of Neuroscience, who became England’s richest doctor. Doctors had been prescribing chocolate for those who could afford it for decades, especially to women, claiming it would ‘make them fat and comely’.
Chicken and Pigeon Therapy
Among plague cures, chicken therapy was memorable. Pluck feathers from a live chicken and hold the bare part to your plague sore until the bird dies—presumably of shock. Use more live birds until one survives. This bird’s survival meant the plague spirits left you. Pigeons were also used. The logic was supported by elite doctors.
When John Donne fell ill in 1623, the king’s physicians put dead pigeons at his head. In 1656, Christopher Irvine said that ‘the arse of a hen plucked bare, and applied to the biting of a viper, freeth the body from venom’. Pigeon cures were used in popular medicine through the 19th century.
Aqua Divina
This ‘divine water’ may have looked pleasant, but a Paracelsian chemist prepared it by taking ‘a whole carcass…of one killed by a violent death…’ cutting it into very small pieces, and mashing it up until the whole pulverised mass was indistinguishable.
Few patients drank Aqua Divina. The corpse pâté was distilled into liquid and mixed with the patient’s blood to take away disease. Johann Schroeder recommended this recipe. John Keogh still recommended it in 1739.
Poison
Besides medicines from human corpses, there were guides to distilling poisons from human bodies, often live ones. One 1638 account told of a red-headed sailor abducted in North Africa, found hung upside down with his back broken. Vipers were forced into his mouth, then he was hung in the sun with a silver basin under his mouth. The liquid made a deadly poison.
Another story told how a cardinal used his mistress to make poison. He buried her waist-deep in a courtyard and applied vipers to her breasts to milk poison.
Patients? I piss on them!
In 1580, Italian doctor Leonardo Fioravanti saw a soldier cut off Andreas Gutiero’s nose. Fioravanti picked it up, ‘and pissed thereon to wash away the sand’ before stitching it back and dressing it. The nose was ‘fast conglutinated’ after eight days, and Gutiero recovered.
Urine is sterile when it leaves the body and was safer than available water. Urea is used in modern medicine for ulcers and infected wounds. Henry VIII’s surgeon, Thomas Vicary, used urine against wounds, and Thomas Willis advised patients to drink their own.
Borrowed Arm
In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi described reconstructing a damaged nose. A skin flap was cut from the patient’s arm and stitched onto the nose. Stitches were removed after a week, but the nose was splinted to the arm for three weeks. Imagine having your nose splinted against someone else’s arm!
An Italian nobleman paid his servant to donate arm skin for his new nose. After three weeks, the servant was freed. The operation seemed successful, but the nose rotted because the servant died and the nose retained a ‘secret sympathy’ with its host. For trying to improve on God’s work, Tagliacozzi’s corpse was exhumed and cast out of holy ground.
Cutting for the Stone
Upon his death in 1622, Nicholas Byfield’s autopsy found a 33-ounce bladder stone. After Samuel Pepys was cut for the stone in 1658, he kept it as a memento. In 1669, John Evelyn’s brother suffered from a bladder stone but resisted surgery. Evelyn took Pepys to persuade him.
Evelyn didn’t tell his brother about lithotomies he saw in Paris in 1650. One patient had a stone bigger than a turkey egg removed. The patient was stripped and tied to a chair while the surgeon cut through the scrotum and pulled the stone out. Evelyn saw another patient show cheerfulness and joy when the stone was drawn. This patient was a child.
These treatments may seem shocking today, but they highlight how medicine has evolved. From bizarre ingredients to gruesome procedures, our ancestors endured much in the name of health.
What do you think about these old medical treatments? Let us know in the comments below!
