Medicine In The 19th Century

Since the dawn of man, humans have dreaded the suffering caused by injuries and disease. For our benefit, we have enhanced the practices of Medicine and its techniques, but before such ideas existed; the risk of recovery was extremely traumatic and at times fatal. We have abandoned several of the medical procedures used in ancient times since intrepid scientists and physicians sought methods. Although medicine was not always a science, instead it was magic, thus god were trusted for a few techniques more than actual logic. Therefore, the history of medicine has been disturbing and dangerous, but a good number of its practices today used in a more modern way, is quite beneficial to humanity.

Much of ancient medicine was shockingly obnoxious

in the way that we today would never desire to experience. In ancient Egypt, numerous people who suffered from ordinary discomfort such as toothaches and earaches believed mice would be the best solution. They decided that dead mice would be an effective remedy for this issue. Egyptians would mash up the dead mice into a paste and then apply it to the irritated area, and for serious toothaches, a complete dead mouse’s corpse was laid into the person’s mouth onto the tooth. Practical thinking tells us that this method could not have worked. It would probably result in more problems, making it an inconvenient infection by imprudent acts. Fortunately, this treatment practiced before is not anymore for any purpose at all. However, a remedy created by ancient Aboriginal Australians is in use today. What the Aboriginal Australians did was“…grind up the grub worms [and then] pack the crushed worms into any cut or abrasion that required healing”. “The paste made from the grub worms would assist in the healing process,” said Jonathan Kantor author of health article 10 Ancient Medical Practices We Thankfully Abandoned. Additionally, they would place a bandage onto the grub to keep out air and bacteria. Now a days, this remedy is no longer medically used, but Aboriginal Australian tribes still harvest the insects to use for their unique delicacies.
Now a few of the ancient medical techniques practiced as treatments or cures were unbelievably hazardous. One remedy used today that is quite common, yet thought as unhealthy or harmful is tobacco. By the Native Americans, it was the best medicinal remedy for anything from chronic pain to tuberculosis. They grounded up leaves, smoked them, ate them and applied it as an ointment. We have known for a while that smoking tobacco cigarettes lead to cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer, but we combine them with an irrational amount of chemicals. The tobacco used by Native Americans was pure, but still risky when used medically. Doctors of the 19th century believed that it could treat illnesses such as, ringworms, constipation, hernias, and infections when it was orally, or rectally taken, or applied externally. As we know now nicotine and tobacco are addictive. Therefore, it is not advised to be used medically any more.
Another method used until the 19th century was known as bloodletting and thought to be started by the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, but didn’t become a common technique till the time of ancient Greece and Rome.

For thousands of years the medical specialists believed that sickness was simply the result of a little “bad blood”. Influential physicians like Hippocrates and Galen stated that the human body was filled with four basic elements, or “humors”—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood—and these needed to be kept in balance to maintain proper health. As a result, doctors diagnosed patients that had a fever or other sicknesses with an overabundance of blood. To restore the balance the specialists would cut open a vein and drain some of their crucial fluids into a container until they felt it was no longer necessary. Furthermore, some instances used leeches to suck the blood straight from the skin. This method finally fell out of trend after innovative research showed that it might be doing more harm than good, still, leeching and controlled bloodletting are used today as treatments for assuring rare illnesses. For the benefits of it “The less blood that's available, the harder it is for the bacterium to scrounge up enough heme to thrive”, stated by Miranda Hitti author of Bloodletting's

Benefits.
Although, one more daring and excruciating procedure used by ancient Inca civilizations was Trepanation. This is one of humanity’s oldest form of surgery and one of its most gruesome. For about 7 thousand years, trepanation was involved in civilizations around the world. It was a practice of forming unappealing holes in the skull with the intention of curing illnesses. Researchers can only guess on how or why this method was used, but a common theory is that it may have been some form of tribal ritual for freeing evil spirits thought to possess the sick and mentally ill. Others argue that it was a more mundane surgery used to treat epilepsy, headaches, abscesses and blood clots. To do this researcher Andrushko says, "The skull was slowly scraped away, resulting in a circular hole surrounded by a wider area of scraped bone". They did not use any anesthetic that we discern, so they must have been awake while the surgery was in process. Amazingly, the survival rate calculated by examining the skulls was nearly 90%. Of course, this procedure is no longer in use today, for we have discovered improved methods of treating such illnesses.
Everybody wants the best-advanced methods for healing infections in the quickest amount of time; however, for some circumstances modern physicians still use traditional techniques.

For example, the Native Americans used a therapy involving maggots. Maggots used today clean wounds of the dead flesh, which prevents tissue infections. The therapy is effortless the doctors simply place the maggots into or around the wound and let the worms to their job. “The maggots are an incredible debriding machine,” says assistant professor Kovach, “and you’ll never see a cleaner wound than one that has maggots in it.” For that reason and being a painless method, we still practice it today. Moreover, a surgery used and possibly practice before maggots by the ancient Egyptians is Transsphenoidal surgery. This surgery entails removing tumors from certain areas of the brain by working through the nose. Raj Sindwani, an otolaryngologist with Cleveland Clinic states, “The ancient Egyptians found that the access point to the brain was the nose, they used to remove the brain through the nose before mummification. We now take advantage of this technique by removing brain tumors in that area.” Obviously, they did not do this surgery for the same reason we do today, perhaps because they would not have been able to sustain a patient’s life while doing so. One more surgery experienced by millions of mothers known as C-sections or Cesarean sections originated in 350 B.C. The origin of "cesarean" is

misleading though and thought to be the outcome name of Julius Caesar’s surgical birth. C-sections deliver one-third of all babies in the present day according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ancient medicine has an extensive and distinctive history so it is impossible to analyze it completely in four pages. Nevertheless, we have perceived the good, the bad, and the ugly of medicine. Therefore, with the feeling of pain still being a burden the history of it will and forever be looked upon then developed for humanity’s health and longevity. “Wherever there is a love for the art of medicine, there is a love for humanity.”- Hippocrates