We Didn't Know Any BetterLists about the pre-historic, ancient, medieval, olden, and not-that-long-ago days of medicine, when doctors made bizarre assumptions and prescribed totally insane treatments that made sense at the time...
True Stories of Lobotomies
The Rich People's Diseases
The 1960s Shutdown of Mental Hospitals
Insane Early Medical Practices
The Morbid History of Shock Therapy
The Study That Separated Twins at Birth
Unethical Experiments on Humans
Scientists' Worst Experiments on Themselves
Cases That Are a Bit Unsettling
WTF Ingredients in American Medicine
Terrifying Devices of the 1900s
Awful Procedures of the 1800s
Leeching and Bloodletting
A Pioneer Dr. Whose Patients Were Slaves
Wack Old-Timey Medical Terms
Making Sure a Corpse Was Dead
Quack Devices That Contained Radium
Doctors Didn't Always Wash Their Hands
What People Thought About Pregnancy
Premature Babies Put on Display
Dissections as a Spectator Sport
17th Century Corpse Medicine
Scary Historical Weight Loss Methods
America's Secret Eugenics Program
Toxic Substances Used in Medicine
Life in a 1900s Mental Hospital
Ways to Test for Pregnancy
Crazy Experiments That Actually Worked
Phrenology: Pseudoscience
The Benefits of Trepanning
Inside an 1880s Insane Asylum
Weird Things People Used as Dentures
Major Medical Product Fails
Bizarre & Nasty Dental Practices
Weird History
19 Bizarre Medical Practices From History That Sound Made Up – But Aren't
Updated September 10, 2021 54.5k votes 11.6k voters 600.6k views
List Rules
Vote up the medical practices that you can't believe were real.
Modern medicine has seen more development in the past 50 years than in all of human history combined. Many long-practiced medical treatments now seem completely bizarre in retrospect - things like putting animal dung on a wound, drinking urine, carving holes in your skull, or drinking medicinal potions made of morphine or mercury. But which practices are considered the most peculiar from all of human medical history? Which practices were once used as medicinal treatments only to be later found incredibly dangerous?
In truth, there were numerous odd things used as medicine before the advent of modern science. However, some of these practices continue to be used today in one form or another. This just proves that sometimes, no matter how untoward, abnormal or perplexing they truly are, if something works, doctors are going to keep doing it.
On this list are some of the dangerous, unconventional, and questionable historical medical practices from around the world. Many of them may sound unbelievable, but they have been proven to have existed.
Later, the English in the time of Elizabeth I cured their warts by cutting a mouse in half and applying it to the spots. Bits of expired mice were also used to treat whooping cough, smallpox, measles, and bed-wetting – all to varying degrees of success.
Doctors In The 1950s Used Malaria Infections To Cure Syphilis
A common 1950s medical practice involved intentionally infecting syphilis patients with malaria. The theory was that the fever produced by the malaria virus would kill off the syphilis disease and that the malaria virus would then be cleared up through some other treatment.
In reality, although the injected malaria virus had positive results in eliminating the syphilis virus, it caused intense fever attacks for weeks and longstanding side effects that spanned decades.
Medieval Doctors Swore A Hot Poker Could Cure Hemorrhoids
Virtually everything has a patron saint - even painful hemorrhoids. It was once believed that if a person did not pray to the canonized Irish monk St. Fiacre, who was said to protect one from such maladies, that they would suffer from hemorrhoids. If a person chose not to pray to St. Fiacre and came down with hemorrhoids, they were sent off to the monks who would put a red-hot iron on them. Alternatively, the patient could sit on St. Fiacre’s famous rock, the spot where the seventh-century monk was miraculously cured of his own hemorrhoids.
Later treatments were far less painful and more effective, like soaking in a hot bath.