Page 56 - All About History 58 - 2017 UK

Through History

QUACK MEDICINE

For as long as there has been medicine, there has been quack medicine —
cure-alls predicated on cluelessness and more sinister snake oil scams

Paracelsus’ gold
GOLD 2500 BCE chloride was still
As far back as 2500 BCE the Chinese knew gold was prescribed in LOBOTOMY 1888
the 17th century,
resistant to corrosion, and they associated it with sometimes With no surgical experience, Swiss doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt
prolonged life. But with the rise of alchemy in Medieval coated with operated on patients with schizophrenia and psychotic
times, the quest to create a drinkable form of gold gold to make hallucinations using a trephine (a round bone saw like a
gilded pills
kicked into high gear. Around 1300 CE an alchemist cookie-cutter on a stick) to drill holes near the temples. He
named Geber figured out how to make gold dissolve cut through the brain’s dura and scooped out parts of the
in a liquid, producing a salt – gold chloride – that could cerebral cortex with, in some cases, a sharp spoon. But while
be mixed with water. 16th-century alchemist Paracelus it was the first lobotomy, the term was only later coined
later claimed drinkable gold helped with mania, by US neurologist Walter Freeman, who partnered with
epilepsy and St Vitus Dance disease. Yet it was toxic. neurosurgeon James Watt in 1936 to ‘cure’ mental health.
The gold chloride salts could cause kidney damage They famously performed an unsuccessful operation on
and auric fever. This made the sufferer feverish and Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy.
involved profuse salivation and urination. Lobotomies also left many patients incapacitated or caused
them to die from haemorrhaging.

BLOOD-LETTING 1623
The earliest evidence of blood-letting
actually dates back to the Egyptians in
around 1500 BCE, but in medieval Europe
barber-surgeons would attempt to bleed
away smallpox, epilepsy and plague.
Bizarrely, in 1623 French physician Jacques
Ferrand even thought the practice could cure
lovesickness – particularly if the sufferer was
“plump and well fed”. His recommendation Freeman (left) was no charlatan,
for a broken heart was blood-letting to the but he bypassed neurosurgeons
(including Watt, right) by
Franz point of heart failure (literal heart failure, performing his own lobotomies
Mesmer that is). He also noted that, “The opening of using ice picks
the hemorrhoids is the surest remedy.”
1734 – 1815, GERMAN Dr Isaac
Franz Mesmer was a young doctor
who believed every disease was the Thompson
result of an imbalance in the body of a “His recommendation for a 1775 - 1852, AMERICAN
universal magnetic fluid susceptible to Composer Wolfgang Dr Isaac Thompson wasn’t actually a
gravitational force. He believed that Amadeus Mozart lost broken heart was blood-letting doctor, but he patented and marketed
by laying his hands on patients and an estimated four a cure-all for eye complaints. It was
engaging his willpower, he could pints of blood in his to the point of heart failure” introduced in 1795 and continued to be
manipulate this fluid and final week thanks to sold into the 20th century. In 1906
heal the sick. blood-letting it was found to contain opium as
an ingredient, explaining
its popularity.
Medicinal clay was dubbed terra
sigillata (sealed earth). Ottoman
EATING DIRT 500 BCE Turks were convinced clay from
Armenia cured the plague
The practice of geophagy – eating dirt – is ancient. In
500 BCE the inhabitants of Lemnos, a Grecian island in
the Mediterranean, harvested red medicinal clay from a
particular hill on a special day each year. It was washed,
refined, rolled to a particular thickness and formed into little
tablets, then the island’s priestesses blessed and stamped
them with their official seal. But while clay slows down the
absorption of drugs within the digestive tract and is helpful
for healing wounds, the quackery part comes from the
religious significance attached to the hills of Lemnos. These
were claimed to enhance the pill’s power.

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