Medical MattersBooks on the history of medicine have one thing in common: illustrations of the often cruel and sometimes bizarre treatments used on patients down through the ages. These pictures certainly speak louder than words, although some text might help to enlighten the thinking behind the strange interventions, writes Muiris Houston
So it was with some interest that I picked up American publication Weird Curesrecently, subtitled "the most hilarious, disgusting and downright dangerous medical treatments ever". While Hippocrates advised doctors "primum non nocere" (first do no harm), others simply mistrusted physicians. "There is no quicker way to health than to do without a doctor," said Petrarch in the 14th century. In 1711, Joseph Addison observed, "when a nation abounds in physicians it grows thin of people". And even in the 1800s, Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of medicine at Harvard, wrote, "if all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity".
The 16th-century professor of medicine Paracelsus became fed up with the "spurious" medical books of the time. He decided to "abandon such a miserable art and seek truth elsewhere". Turning to folk remedies and the occult, he came up with what was probably the first attempt at artificial conception, in this case without the services of a woman.
Instead, he advised that if "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 40 days or so long until it begin to be alive, move and stir, which may be easily seen . . . then for the space of 40 weeks kept in a constant, equal heat of horse dung, it will become a true and living infant".
Amazingly, the method never caught on.
There were some strange cures for "male troubles". Julius Althaus was a Victorian surgeon who recommended applying electric current to cure impotence. One electrode was placed inside the penis, with another attached to the lower back. After running a current between the two, the imagined "blockage" would be cleared out.
But there was one problem - the electrode had a tendency to become fused to the mucous membrane inside the penis. To free the flesh and remove the electrode, doctors were advised to reverse the current. "If skilfully performed, this somewhat complicated proceeding is not unpleasant," Althaus averred.
Bed rest could hardly do much harm, could it? Certainly not, according to neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who in the late 1800s observed that complete cure from female hysteria could be achieved through six weeks of bed rest. "I am daily amazed to see how kindly nervous and anaemic women take to this absolute rest, and how little they complain of its monotony . . . The result is always at first, whatever it may be afterwards, a sense of relief, and a remarkable and often abrupt disappearance of many of the nervous symptoms with which we all of us are only too sadly familiar."
Some old cures were literally tortuous. Strappado, an orthopaedic treatment favoured by the ancient Greeks, became a form of torture in medieval times. A manuscript from Byzantium described the use of strappado for a bad back: the patient was tied to a ladder which was dropped vertically to the ground. The idea was that the displaced vertebrae would be jolted into alignment. Patients with curvature in the lower spine were suspended upside down by their feet. "Raise the ladder against a high tower or home," the manuscript says. "The ground should be solid and the assistants well trained so that they will let the ladder fall smoothly and in a vertical position . . . it is best to drop it from a mast by a pulley."
It is easy to dismiss the old cures of the ancient Greeks and even those of the 18th and 19th century on the grounds of paucity of scientific thought and discovery. It is less easy to forgive a more recent surgical procedure such as lobotomy. First used by Antonio Moniz in 1936, it was the American psychiatrist Dr Walter Freeman who refined the technique, using an ice pick inserted under local anaesthetic through the eye socket, to damage the prefrontal lobes. It's estimated that up to 50,000 procedures were carried out in the US between 1936 and 1960.
By the 1940s lobotomy was used for a wide range of conditions from criminality to neurosis. In a soon to be published autobiography, Howard Dully tells of how he was Freeman's youngest patient, at the age of 12. My Lobotomy describes the consequences of a treatment carried out to combat a wilful nature, consequences Dully has had to live with for the past 48 years.
With a mortality rate of around 14 per cent, many who survived were left in a persistent vegetative state. At the age of 23, Rose Kennedy, sister of JFK, underwent lobotomy to treat her mild learning difficulties. After treatment, she lived in an institution until her death at the age of 86. I wonder what future generations will find odd about our current range of treatments? Some may well stand the test of time even if the indication for their use will change. One concoction patented in 1830, reputed to cure conditions such as athlete's foot and hair loss, Dr Miles's Compound Extract of Tomato, is still with us today. We now use it to spice up hamburgers and chips and call it ketchup.
Dr Houston is pleased to hear from readers at mhouston@irish-times.ie but regrets he is unable to reply to individual medical queries.