Most people take modern medicine for granted. Nowadays, we can just hop on down to our local pharmacies, drugstores, or supermarkets, pick up pills in convenient, medical blister packaging or syrups in tamper-proof bottle packaging designs, and be on our way to recovery. Back in the day, though, people took harsh herbs and chemicals that turned out to do more harm than good, really.
Here are just a few examples of harmful, archaic medical practices to help you appreciate how good we have it with our modern medicine and pharma packaging practices.
Eating a Rock Was Not a Cure All.
For hundreds of years, people believed that if you consumed a bezoar — an indigestible mass formed in the gastrointestinal system — you would be universally cured of any poison. The first recorded use of a bezoar was by Arab physician Ibn Zuhr, who died in 1161. More than 400 years after his death, the surgeon Ambroise Pare devised an experiment to test the bezoar. A man on death row chose to be poisoned instead of hung. After consuming the lethal toxin, Pare gave the man a bezoar. Naturally, it didn’t work, and the prisoner died in agony seven hours later.
Escargot to Make Your Cough Escargone.
As mentioned before, modern pharma packaging services pack cough syrups composed of disease-combating drugs into high quality plastic bottles, but what if these pharma packaging services put snail syrup in there instead? For centuries, people thought they could get ride of sore throats and coughs with the mucilaginous essence of snails. One doctor wrote in 1728, “To make a syrup of snails, take Garden snails … one pound; take off their shells; slit them; and with half a pound of sugar, put them in a bag; hang them in a cellar.” No thanks! We’ll take our modern cough syrups and tamper proof pharma packaging instead of a bag of snail slime.
Sugar Highs as Schizophrenia Treatments.
In the earlier half of the 20th century, psychiatric clinics would treat schizophrenic patients with glucose shots, which would cause insulin comas that then resulted in severe brain damage. Unfortunately, these treatments often proved fatal.
The next time you’re in your drug store, be thankful for our modern medicine and pharma packaging, even if you have trouble getting pharma packaging’s child proof cap off. If you have any comments about these old medicines, feel free to share.
