Strange Medicine

Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages Paperback – July 2, 2013

Author: Visit Amazon's Nathan Belofsky Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0399159959 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages – July 2, 2013
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From Publishers Weekly

Belofsky (The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities) conjures horror and hilarity--sometimes at the same time-in this cheeky history of 2,400 years of doctors doing "more harm than good" and occasionally fumbling their way toward "Eureka!"...medicine sunk to its lowest point during its "Heroic Era."...Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, would strap patients...and spin them "like tops for hours on end."...Makes a shot in the rear seem like a walk in the park.

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From Booklist

For a very long time, medical professionals often did more damage than healing...As recently as the 1800s, physicians were "medical wrecking balls," inflicting on the sick therapies as extreme as bloodletting, purging, and blistering. Belofsky offers a brief, unnerving, and fascinating romp through medical history, from Babylonia to...Greece, the Roman Empire, medieval times, the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century America...Strange Medicine depicts doctors who were frequently ferocious and relentless but only occasionally inventive and ingenious. --Tony Miksanek

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Direct download links available for Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages Paperback – July 2, 2013

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Perigee Trade; 1 edition (July 2, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0399159959
ISBN-13: 978-0399159954
Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.4 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #295,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

The path to modern medicine is strewn with helpful and malignant practices, all of which are wondrous to the modern reader. The earliest theories most of us have heard are included which concern the four humors of the body believed to cause health and disease, blood, black bile, yellow bile or phlegm. In ancient Rome the first doctors were better known as "executioners." Little was known about the human body and experimentation by analysis of internal anatomy was mostly forbidden until the time of Leonardo da Vinci when cadavers were used to study the body.
Add to that the superstitions of the ancient world where some believed illness arrived via the presence of ghosts, elves, or other malignant, demonic spirits. Therefore one could reason that such dangerous beings called for severe measures. But what does one think when considering the use of electric eels attached to the head to treat migraine headaches? Or what about using branding irons to cauterize parts of the head until bone was exposed? Sounds gruesome but burning away, on par with later uses of leeches to purge the blood of illness at the time seemed quite logical.
On the other hand, the well-known Hildegard of Bingen's (12th Century) believed the origins of all sickness were linked to lungs, spleen and liver, a theory that many alternative medicine practitioners today follow with substantial success. Or one could read about the 19th Century practitioner Mandt prescribed a laxative for the first time for a patient who had swallowed a snake.
The terrors of surgery were quite real to almost all patients in the nineteenth century where gangrene, lack of anesthesia, and surgical errors proved deadly to far too many victims.