19 Bizarre Medical Practices From History That Sound Made Up – But Aren't

Dead mice were used for medicinal purposes in Ancient Egypt. Egyptians would blend the remains of the mice with other compounds to ease toothache pain.

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.

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.

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.

An early version of Botox, 19th-century doctors used paraffin wax injections to smooth out wrinkles and in breast augmentation procedures. But wax hardens, and in this case, it hardened into thick, painful lumps known as paraffinomas.

These injections were quickly abandoned once it became widely known that they caused granuloma formations and embolization.