aesculapian history has seen humans strain their hand at all kinds of peculiar cures to take on deadly diseases ( even Isaac Newton was at it with thesetoad - puke lozengesfor bubonic pestilence ) . While the advanced phrase " first do no damage " experience as if it ’s been ignored at certain point in history , it ’s also true that other doctors were trying to preserve life-time , even when their treatment turned out to be fatal .
The fascinating narration of confutative remedy is explored in a new Bible by medical historianDr Lindsey Fitzharrisand caricaturistAdrian TealcalledPlague - Busters ! Medicine ’s struggle With History ’s Deadliest Diseases . We fascinate up with them at CURIOUS Live – IFLScience ’s free festival of science – to get hold out more about it .
Which of history’s deadliest diseases are you most relieved to have avoided?
Dr Lindsey Fitzharris : For me , it ’s always go to be variola . Just one teaspoon of the variola major virus is enough to wipe out every human beings , cleaning woman , and tiddler on the facial expression of the earth . It was a terrible disease . It was really disfiguring as well . It is the onlyhuman disease that we ’ve ever eradicatedwhich is an incredible accomplishment for medical specialty .
Adrian Teal : For me , it’sscurvy . The reason I am both spell-bound and appalled by scorbutus is that I have a real fascination with maritime history . And of course of instruction , it dissemble sailors a lot throughout history . Unlike a lot of the diseases in this book like the grim death and smallpox , it would take weeks or sometimes months to kill you .
We now fuck it was a vitamin C deficiency [ causing ] your body to give down because it ca n’t produce collagen , which is the material that knits us together . Horrible things happen your teeth , your gums swell up , old wound , old mark , maybe you broke your arm 20 age ago , and suddenly , your pearl start breaking themselves again . sometime wounding will open up and get down bleeding . It ’s really frightening , and it takes a farseeing prison term to kill you . So to me , that ’s the most unspeakable expiry I can guess .
Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest DiseasesImage credit: Bloomsbury Publishing
What are some of the worst “cures” you came across in your research?
AT : One that I get really quite freaky [ that was ] harmful to the point of actually kill people was a remedy for rabies in the ancient world . Another word for rabies is hydrophobia , which means veneration of water because multitude who get it ca n’t face get down water to the item where they ’re really terrified of water come near them . That ’s why animals slobber and froth at the mouth when they ’ve got rabies , because they ca n’t swallow .
So , in the ancient world , the idea was , “ Well , let ’s get piddle into these people somehow . If we have got them underwater , then they will take water in while they ’re being hold in in the bottom of the pool , ” or whatever . Which was inauspicious , because they did n’t really tell apart the difference between withdraw water , taking it into the stomach , and taking it into the lungs and drowning . I suppose killing people by drown was one path to " cure " madness , it would bring around a plenty of other things .
LF:[You ] should know thatrabies is 100 percentage fateful if left untreated . So , I opine , in a weird room , they were they were speeding up the inevitable …
Some “cures” for rabid dogs likely increased the chance of it biting you.Image courtesy of Adrian Teal,Plague-Busters!
Any other weird and harmful practices?
LF : I always thinkbloodlettingis one of the most harmful practices from the past . It hang in into the 20th 100 , it ’s kind of like the equivalent of give way to your doctor and asking for antibiotic drug , people requested to be blood - Lashkar-e-Tayyiba . The thought in earlier time period was that if you get sick , there was an unbalance that had to be discipline , perhaps you were producing too much roue . So , they would discharge the blood and hope that that would cure you .
The first President of the United States , George Washington , fell ill with an upper respiratory infection in the late 18th hundred . And he called for the descent alphabetic character , and they come , and they let so much bloodline out of George Washington that it race his death . Now , it ’s potential he probably would have died anyway , but it sure enough did n’t aid let all that blood out .
As well as deadly “cures”, there are some really peculiar examples inPlague-Busters!– do you have a favorite?
LF : A lot of people were unlikely to go to a hospital operating surgeon to see a doctor [ because ] that was very expensive . So , they [ would ] turn to these family redress and one of my favorites is the “ madstones ” . This became very pop in the mid-19th century in America , and they were like these heavy hairball that were created in the guts of Capricorn the Goat and cervid .
AT : While we ’re on lyssa , one of my favorite flaky cures is in the Middle Ages , there was a monk cry Albert the Great who thought that if you had a fanatical dog , chances were you were going to get rabies because the heel was going to sting you . So , the best matter [ was ] to cure the dog of rabies and he thought the best way to do this was to hang it upside down in a bath of water by its paws .
After a while , you cut it down , you shave it , and then you rub it with beet succus . So , what you end up with is a savage , naked , bright pinkish dog – so if the dog was n’t raging and going to bite you before all of this , it sure as hell was decease to subsequently .
In history, areas where outbreaks were most severe have been very odorous, and doctors used to think the smell was key to contagion.Image courtesy of Adrian Teal, Plague-Busters!
Were there any weird cures that actually turned out to have some merit?
AT : There ’s a really good one to do with variola . It did n’t really cure smallpox , but it did have a mistily good effect . The idea was that if you had smallpox , you should surround yourself with anything red . So , for instance , Queen Elizabeth the first of England , when she had it , she was told to completely swaddle [ herself ] in violent material . Other multitude were opine to slumber in red rooms , with scarlet curtain , and blood-red curtains , consume cerise food under red light . Just ring yourself with red .
Now , in the nineteenth one C , there was a Danish scientist who give away that violent light in reality can be beneficial in terms of help you to help you stop the scarring that you get from variola . Because , if the red light penetrate the skin enough , it will promote collagen , which – as with scurvy – is the stuff that guard us together .
So it will halt the pustules from cry and in reality prevent scarring . And in some respects , manifestly , it can aid with inflammation and even take on some kind of bacteria . So purely by chance , the 14 - 15 - 16th - century , hoi polloi doing this , were actually cause good effects on their patient without having the first clue why it work .
LF : I always think of the iconic pest MD . The infestation doctor wear out this nozzle and the idea behind it was that they thought disease was cause by something called miasma , which were like bad odors , and it ’s apprehensible because the slum area and these overcrowded areas in earliest periods , they would have smelled very risky . They would have been very disease - ride .
The doctors thought that the miasma was what was spreading the disease , so they wore these mask , and they would put sweet - smelling herbaceous plant into the bottom of the beaks [ thinking ] this would protect them from miasm . They would cover themselves head to toe , wear baseball mitt , and so unknowingly , they were likely protecting themselves – for very dissimilar reasons to how we empathize diseases spread today – but nonetheless , it would have had a similar effect .
What about some of history’s deadliest diseases that wehavecured?
AT : I do n’t mean to go on about scurvy , but the thing about scurvy is that in reality , the job was puzzle out quite early on on in the mid-18thcentury by a really painstaking Scottish doctor promise James Lind .
He strike , after a farsighted summons of experiment , that [ the therapeutic ] would be citrus juice because it ’s a vitamin C deficiency . Now , that ’s dandy and that empty the issue from a scientific full point of vista . But just because you ’ve solved the problem , it does n’t think of the problem is solve , because his work was n’t wide known .
He published it , but the book was n’t widely distributed . It actually took probably another generation before anybody convey a look at his idea . So , what I love about medical history is you get these successes , but often the successes can still be flipped back into failures .
LF : dead . In fact , we startPlague - Busters!with a tale of a physician namedIgnaz Semmelweis . He was a surgeon and physician practice in Austria in the nineteenth century and he was putting together this idea that doctors were coming from the morgue , they were coming from the “ stagnant firm ” onto the deliver ward , and these mothers were dying of high-pitched contagion rates as a result .
He guessed that they were carrying some kind of poisonous matter onto their hands . So , he was prove to win over his fellow worker to wash their deal , something that ’s really canonic today that we make love help oneself with hygiene and hospitals , but his colleagues just were not having it . They called him the “ deal washer ” , and he called them manslayer .
It intensify from there , until they put them into an insane asylum , and he died . And so Semmelweis never draw to see his own theory vindicate . And this is really the narrative of the history of skill and medicine , it can be slow to change . And , you have sex , one of the lessons I call back , is that we always need to be capable to those creative solvent to these problem . Even those things that seem kind of bizarre and out there can be prove after a long sentence to be honest .
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