The history of medicine has some dark spots, in the form of mistakes, nonsensical practices, crazy anatomical concepts, and outlandish ideas that certain doctors ruthlessly applied to their patients. Some of these practices lasted for centuries , until serious research managed to put them aside. Others were no more than one-off experiments, as useless as they were surprising.
One of the most prestigious medical publications in history owes its name to a colossal mistake: The Lancet , founded in 1823 and still in existence today. It is named for the lancet, a basic instrument in the equipment of all the doctors of past times , who used it mainly to carry out bleeding.
According to Douglas Starr in his book History of Blood , the practice of forcing bleeding has been the one that has lasted the longest: more than 2,500 years since it appeared in the ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations. Its origin is uncertain, although it is usually related to the so-called theory of humors – the four elements (phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and blood) , on whose balance good health depended -, formulated by the Greeks. Purging the body of blood through continuous extractions allowed to restore this balance and heal from pneumonia to migraines, through hypertension or bone fractures.
And this despite the fact that not one of these effects could ever be demonstrated. This method had such enthusiastic supporters as Guy Patin, dean of the Faculty of Paris, who in the seventeenth century believed it to be a miracle remedy. In addition to using it profusely on patients of all ages and conditions, he led by example: he bled his wife twelve times for congestion, his son twenty times for a fever , and his octogenarian father-in-law and himself seven times for a cold.
Animal-human transfusions
This was not the only reckless practice related to blood: in the 17th century Jean-Baptiste Denis, physician to Louis XIV, was interested in experiencing the effects of the transfusion of animal blood to human beings. After a year of preliminary practices between different animals, in 1667 he injected calf blood to a man who suffered from violent and sudden attacks of cholera . Denis’s reasoning was that the bovid’s natural meekness would carry over to his patient and curb his disorders. The truth is that he survived, but by a pure miracle, after several days vomiting and urinating black liquid.
Neither Denis nor his English colleagues, who engaged in similar experiments, could then know that the proteins in animal blood are incompatible with those of human : therefore, what they were really doing was triggering the immune system of the patient. It produced huge amounts of antibodies to repel invading cells: “The kidneys struggle to filter out toxic hemoglobin and cell fragments. Red blood cells die in the millions and oxygenated hemoglobin turns urine black, “says Starr.
The audacity caused by the lack of preliminary information and the bold assumptions have given rise, over the centuries, to an appreciable number of pseudo-medical practices with results ranging from the absurd to the homicidal . It is obvious that, with the knowledge of their respective times, doctors could know little about what they were really doing, and they were convinced to act for the benefit of their patients and medical science. However, there are ideas and procedures that would not be out of place in a horror novel … Or black humor.
Far from being formulated by outlandish individuals, some of the most developed theories and therapies were born from well-respected medical professionals of their day . A good example is the German Georg Stahl (1660-1734), creator of the so-called theory of animism: it was the anima – the soul – that housed the ultimate cause of life and controlled organic processes, which is why many diseases are they were due to misguided activities of the spirit.
The fever was nothing but the mental struggle to expel the disease, so it should not be fought. In addition to this theory, he doubted the efficacy of opium or quinine, and recommended castration as a remedy for hernias. It must be said that Stahl became personal physician to King Frederick William I of Prussia, who died at the age of 52.
The system varied little through the centuries: the lancet – a sharp double-edged knife – opened a vein with a diagonal or longitudinal cut, while a tourniquet controlled the flow of blood, which was collected in a calibrated container to measure the amounts .
Healing Leeches
The influence of François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772-1838), Professor of Pathology at the University of Paris, who based all his therapy on the principle of irritation was also great : life itself was nothing but the product of that reaction, which excited chemical processes in the body and, when it was excessive, it led to gastrointestinal inflammation, whatever the disease. Tuberculosis, syphilis and mental disorders originated in the intestine, so it was not worth resorting to localization in the diagnoses.
If the idea was dangerous, his therapy was even more dangerous: reducing inflammation through a low-calorie regimen and bleeding – again – using leeches. Broussais became so popular that France had to import these Hirudines to meet the demand: if in 1825 just over two million of these invertebrates were used, by 1833 the figure exceeded 41 million .
Interestingly, bizarre ideas sometimes come from professionals who have made valuable contributions to medical science in other fields. This was the case of Pierre Adolphe Piorry (1794-1879), who in the 18th century contributed to improving the design of stethoscopes and made undisputed advances in the field of percussion or pleximetry diagnostics. The problem was that he declared that each organ – lungs, liver, heart – had its own sound with which it responded to percussion, something that was proven completely false .
For his part, Jean Baptiste Brouillard (1796-1881), who made great advances in diseases of the circulatory system and the nervous system, spent his last years defending bleeding as therapy, despite the fact that at that time its effectiveness was more than questioned. . In addition, he did not stop disavowing the investigations of Louis Pasteur.
However, these eccentricities were peccata minuta by certain experiments. What do flatulence and decapitation have in common? Nothing, in principle, except for the years 1814 and 1815, in which the doctor François Magendie got the Government of Paris to provide him with the corpses of four guillotined with the idea of studying the gases that still contained their stomachs.
As they had received their last meal a couple of hours before the execution, “their digestion was fully active at the time of their death,” he wrote. Magendie extracted gas from each body at four points in the digestive system, and measured its components. Their conclusions were that the greatest amount of hydrogen was not contained in the condemned man who had eaten lentils, but in the one who had chosen Gruyère cheese and bread . It is to wonder if the results of their investigations deserved to go through such a macabre process.
The previous centuries had already seen the appearance of other aberrant practices based on the principle of correspondence that prevailed before the arrival of modern medicine. For example, Pliny the Elder wrote that the wounded were cured by killing an animal with the same iron that had injured them and by eating its meat, and he was convinced that the iron that had taken a human life had therapeutic virtues. They were beliefs that were related to the influence that corpses were supposed to have on the living.
The ‘beneficial’ properties of a corpse
This influence was manifested in its supposed curative properties, collected by the historian Philippe Ariès: “The list of beneficial properties of the corpse even reaches the aphrodisiac concoction, made from the charred bones of happy spouses and dead lovers . The dresses of the dead, even a fragment, heal headaches and hemorrhoids ”.
One of the main defenders of this belief was the German Lutheran physician Christian Friedrich Garmann, author of the posthumous book De miraculis mortuorum , which included the recipe for divine water, with practically miraculous properties: the main ingredient was the corpse of a man who enjoyed good health, but that he would have died a violent death . That body was cut into small pieces, including bones and viscera, mixed well with the blood, and reduced to liquid in an alembic. The resulting product was an infallible test to determine whether a sick person was going to be cured or not. A few drops of his blood were added to the concoction and if these did not dissolve it was a sign of death. Ariès warned that these types of preparations, for obvious reasons, were very expensive and complicated to prepare and, therefore, were reserved for wealthy or powerful people.
One of these lucky ones was King Charles II of England (1630-1685), who during his last illness drank a potion of 43 drops of human skull extracts . Pasteur had to arrive to stop so much use of compounds from corpses.
There were other cases of questionable experiments, whose subjects, not to mention their victims, were people from lower social strata . Perhaps the most spectacular was the one that occurred in the early nineteenth century in the United States and was collected, like that of Magendie, by Mary Roach in her book Glup. Adventures in the alimentary canal. It so happened that, at the age of eighteen, the trapper Alexis Saint Martin was seriously injured as a result of a gunshot in the side; so badly, in fact, that the wound never closed.
The mess developed into a fistula where the hole in the stomach joined with the upper holes in the muscles and skin. This phenomenon suggested to William Beaumont, the same surgeon who had operated on Saint Martin, the idea that he was faced with a unique and wonderful opportunity to experiment first-hand with the direct action of stomach juices .
For several years, he used the hole to introduce various foods tied with a string into the stomach of the trapper, which he recovered a few hours later . Some had disappeared, fully digested, as if ingested by normal procedure; others remained more or less intact, as was the case with raw meat.
What did Beaumont achieve after years of subjecting his patient to this alternative feeding method? According to Roach, “that digestion is chemical, not mechanical , but European scientists had discovered the same thing two centuries earlier using animals. That protein is more easily digested than plant matter. And that gastric juices do not need the vital forces of the body. Not too much, in short ”.
Leaving aside that he overestimated the importance of gastric acids, completely overlooking the role of pepsin and pancreatic enzymes present in the small intestine. There was no lack of suspicions that the appearance of such a curious wound was not accidental , but was intentionally created by Beaumont himself, who already had in mind to use the trapper as a guinea pig. However, it is already known: all for the good of science … And on many occasions for the ill of the patient.
Pictures: above, Anagoria via Wikimedia / CC (canvas The surgeon inspects the wound , by Gaspare Traversi); below Jan Arkesteijn via Wikimedia / CC (box The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem Van der Meer by Michael Jansz).
