5 horrifying medical treatments

With Halloween just around the corner EPM has compiled a list of gruesome medical remedies from yesteryear

No spoonful of sugar would have helped with this lot…

Rotten Treacle

Rotten treacle – at least ten years old – was often given to sick patients who had the Black Death in the late medieval eara.

This remedy actually has a touch of sense to it: potentially disease-fighting moulds, yeasts and other cultures would have thrived in the syrup and matured over time, but still, yuck!

Balancing humours

Physicians from Medieval to the Tudor times thought the body was made up of four ‘humours’ that needed to be kept in balance. The humours were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile).

If a person was unwell and had a fever it was thought that they had too much blood as blood was the humour that linked to heat, so to rectify this, doctors bled patients by applying leeches to the skin or cutting a vein.

Treating Syphilis

Mercury was popular in the Tudor period to treat syphilis. The standard treatment was mercury administered with a urethral syringe. A treatment with such a powerful medicine impressed patients and any poisoning symptoms were blamed on the worsening of the original disease.

Human waste

Victims of the Black Death would often be bathed in urine several times a day to relieve symptoms and were even recommended to drink it if they could.

Black Death victims would also have their sores cut open,and a paste of tree resin, flower roots and human faeces applied to their open wounds before being tightly wrapped.

Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup 

Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was for mothers dealing with teething infants in the Victorian era. However, it contained 65 mg of morphine per fluid ounce so this potent concoction often did too good a job when it came to quieting fussing babies.