How downright medieval medicine was in the US/UK until fairly recently has always been bizarre to me. Ancient Egyptians managed to isolate breast cancer as a specific ailment and even attempted treatment through removal and cauterization of tumors way back several millennia earlier, yet as recently as 130 years ago we were doing this weird shit.
Hell, the fact that scurvy is a simple deficiency has been learnt and forgotten multiple times. How easily information is lost (or simply never widely disseminated to begin with) is creepy.
M68000 t1_iy466ru wrote
Reply to TIL after her death, Mercy Brown's heart and liver were burned and the ashes mixed into a tonic that was given to her sick brother to drink. Her father believed that she was a vampire and that the tonic would cure the brother of tuberculosis. It didn't; he died two months later. by NightVisible3767
How downright medieval medicine was in the US/UK until fairly recently has always been bizarre to me. Ancient Egyptians managed to isolate breast cancer as a specific ailment and even attempted treatment through removal and cauterization of tumors way back several millennia earlier, yet as recently as 130 years ago we were doing this weird shit.
Hell, the fact that scurvy is a simple deficiency has been learnt and forgotten multiple times. How easily information is lost (or simply never widely disseminated to begin with) is creepy.