Everyone, before you read (or don’t read) this article, I have one thing to say to you: be grateful for modern medicine. Be very, very grateful for modern medicine. If you were born more than a hundred years ago, whenever you were ill you would have to deal with crap (and I mean “crap” in the worst and most literal sense possible) like the following:
The Everlasting Pill
Way back Victorian times, antimony was considered to be a cure for constipation and other illnesses of the digestive tract. In fairness, it was a cure of sorts, in that when swallowed, a pill of antimony induces violent vomiting and diarrhoea. This is because antimony is highly toxic. That, oddly enough, isn’t the disgusting part.
Don’t you hate getting prescriptions refilled? With the antimony pill, that was never necessary. Only a small amount would be absorbed by your body, and the pill would be left intact for future use. Unfortunately, as you have no doubt realized, retrieving the pill would involve searching through (hopefully) your own poop and vomit, with the intention of eating what you found. Repeated trips to the doctor don’t sound that bad any more, do they?
These pills lasted so long that they could be passed down through a family for generations. It is doubtful that it would have been a part of Grandpa’s estate that the kids fought over.
Boars are… useful?
Look, there’s nothing wrong with enemas per se. Sure, they make immature people giggle, but I am sure that none of our readers are immature or voyeuristic in the slightest. Sometimes an enema is medically or hygienically useful. And sometimes the medieval doctor says “screw it” and pumps a solution of wild boar’s bile up his patient’s rectum.
Yup. Boar bile, literally up the [CENSORED]. It is not clear why this was thought to be a good thing in particular, but boars are big, strong animals and perhaps there was positivity by association. As discussed in a previous column, the ancient Romans had similar ideas about boars, and Roman charioteers would both use boar’s dung on minor injuries and drink dried boar’s dung like protein in shakes.
Back to the enemas: the king of France was a big fan of them, and would sometimes receive an enema while sitting on his throne. It remains unclear whether this was a lavatorial euphemism or not.
Flipping the Bird
In Elizabethan England, bird poop was a common medicine. Don’t worry, it wasn’t in the pill form, or in the enema form. No, it was used as burn cream. According to Elizabeth Gray’s book “A choice manual of rare and select secrets in physick and chyrurgery” (and no, I don’t have the slightest idea what “chyrurgery” is supposed to be, unless Gray really, really failed at spelling “surgery”), a mixture of various plants, boar’s grease (again with the boars!), goose poop, and chicken poop should be mixed together. According to her, the mixture will keep for two years. Curiously, she emphasizes that the chicken poop should be as fresh as possible. So you have it, ladies and gentleman: two-year-old chicken poop is good for burns.
That’s not the only use for bird poop: Sir William Read, who was Queen Anne’s official eye doctor, recommended goose and chicken poop as freaking eye salve. Don’t worry: he clarified that he only meant the liquidy part.
Toad Broth
The English were not an obsessive people; they liked to mix up their grotesquerie every now and then. (Yes, “grotesquerie” is a real word, meaning “bizarre, often disgusting absurdity.” You’re welcome.) There are so many things on God’s green earth, so many more than bird poop. For example, there are toads. Why not boil a few toads alive?
According to John King in 1885, a good recipe for back pain was to boil four (4) toads alive and simmer, add butter and arnica, then apply. He admitted that this was “hard on the toads,” a memorable understatement, but claimed that it was the quickest way to kill them. In so saying, he seems to have lost sight of the fact that he was a practitioner of osteopathic medicine, not a toad exterminator.
Another idea from the 1600s was to rub a tumour with a dead man’s hand until the tumour got hot, which would make the tumour go away (presumably because it took offense).
Of course, when everything else fails, you can go back to the old standby for everything: putting a beet root or cabbage root up your fundament. “Fundament” being an old-timey word for “ass,” which puts a new slant on the word “fundamentalist.”
Speaking of which…
And, of Course, Exorcism
In ancient times, you could never be sure whether your illness was from having too much blood in your body or whether it was caused by a vengeful spirit. (Although a vengeful spirit giving you secret blood transfusions by night would be super crafty.) However, if a competent professional in ancient Babylon diagnosed you with an excess of spirits, you would have to find some way of getting rid of them.
Let’s say that you are an ancient Babylonian who grinds your teeth at night. It’s painful and annoys your wife. However, a Babylonian exorcism didn’t mean the use of incense, crosses, and Latin. The opinion of the priests at the time was that your problem was caused by the ghost of a dead relative, and the remedy was to sleep beside a human skull for a week. That by itself doesn’t get rid of the ghost: you should also kiss and lick the human skull seven times every night.
Honestly, that will annoy your wife even more. On the other hand, it would probably work fairly well:
Dead Uncle Bob: “Woooooooooooo!”
You: “Oh pardon me Uncle Bob, I’m just gonna start making out with this DEAD HUMAN SKULL. Look at meeee, I’m slobbering all over it!”
Dead Uncle Bob: “You’re messed up, dude. I’m outta here.”
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