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By Peter Macinnis, 429 pages, published Mar 26, 2017
Amazon's Description:
The history of medicine is strewn with bizarre notions about what caused illness and death: the gods, witches, poisoners were all early targets. Later the doctrine of humours ruled, and from then onwards, the practice of medicine made perfect sense, if you accepted the crazy model that the medical people were working from.
That was often a big ask, but this book helps you to understand where orthodox medical practitioners were coming from when they applied leeches and dosed people with millipedes, spiders, dog droppings and worse, far worse.
The author has waded through most of the “Domestic Medicine” books that were published from the 1600s on, and delved into a few earlier grimoires as well. Nowhere else will you learn useful ways of repelling bores by discussing the gory details of leech culture and use, but there are far odder treatments awaiting you. Tapeworm traps, lowered down the gullet, artificial limbs and the efficient uses of mummies and hanged men’s thigh bones are there as well as boiled puppies and electric shock.
A half-plucked duck placed on the belly, a hot onion on the crotch, a tobacco pipe up the rectum after drowning, a fried egg on the bite of a mad dog, monkey gland injections, drinking radium-laced water until your jaw crumbles, being x-rayed to restore your youth were all popular. Putting your face in a hole in the ground; taking sugar cane juice or sniffing rotten meat were all recommended for TB, but one expert thought leprosy was caused by eating rotten fish.
Then there were the quacks and patent medicine sellers, a bunch of complete rogues (several of them offered herbal remedies to prevent bubonic plague!). One doctor, while discussing hysteria: “…the case of a whole school of young ladies in Holland, who were all cured by being told, that the first who was seized [with hysteric fits] should be burnt to death.” After that, being stood up to the genitals in cold water for a nose bleed seems benign!
This book began life as a history of Australian quackery, but quacks and patent medicine dealers operate across national boundaries, so the case studies, while showing an Australian bias, also look at events and fads in Europe, Britain, and north America. It is entirely based on the author’s curious (in several senses) research over many years.
Then there are the recipes, including one for artificial asses’ milk, and Robert Boyle’s recipe for convulsions in children: “Take Earth-Worms, wash them well in White-wine to cleanse them, but so as they may not die in the Wine. Then upon hollow Tiles, or between them, dry the Worms with a moderate heat, and no further than that they may be conveniently reduc’d to Powder; to one Ounce of which add a pretty number of Grains of Ambergrise, both to perfume the Powder (whose scent of itself is rank) and to make the Medicine more efficacious.”
Peter Macinnis is an award-winning Australian writer for both adults and children, and his awards come from the Children's Book Council of Australia, the West Australian Premier, the Wilderness Society, and the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, among others.
Trained as a biologist, he cares about the stories behind things, and so he has become well-regarded as an historian, but he remains a curious scientist. He also talks on ABC Radio National from time to time, sometimes teaches adults how to do extreme research and data handling, and thoroughly enjoys being the visiting scientist at his local K-6 school.
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A tobacco pipe up the bum topped off with a pint of ass milk should keep the doctor away.