1960's Cough Medicine That Caused Women to Loose Their Babies

It's hard to keep upwards with the treatment recommendations coming out of the medical customs. One twenty-four hour period something is good for yous, and the adjacent day it's deadly and should be avoided. Addictive drugs like heroin were given to kids to cure coughs, electric shock therapy has been a long used treatment for impotence, and "miracle" diet pills were handed out like candy. Beneath are seven of the most shocking treatments recommended past doctors.

i. Snake Oil—Salesmen and Doctors

Collection of elixirs. (Credit: Efrain Padro/Alamy Stock Photo)

While today a "snake oil salesman" is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods, the use of snake oil has real, medicinal routes. Extracted from the oil of Chinese h2o snakes, information technology likely arrived in the The states in the 1800s, with the influx of Chinese workers toiling on the Transcontinental Railroad. Rich in omega-three acids, it was used to reduce inflammation and treat arthritis and bursitis, and was rubbed on the workers' joints later on a long day of working on the railroad.Enter Clark Stanley, "The Rattlesnake Male monarch." Originally a cowboy, Stanley claimed to have studied with a Hopi medicine man who turned him on to the healing powers of snake oil. He took this new found "noesis" on the road, performing a show-stopping human activity at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where he reached into a bag, grabbed a rattlesnake, cut it open, and squeezed it. He labeled the extract ophidian oil, fifty-fifty though the FDA later confirmed that his products didn't contain any kind of snake oil, rattlesnake or otherwise. That didn't stop other unscrupulous doctors and fraudulent salesmen, who likewise started traveling the American West, peddling bottles of false snake oil, giving the truly beneficial medical treatment a bad name.

2. Cocaine—The Wonder Drug

Advertisement for Cocaine Toothache Drops,1890. Courtesy National Library of Medicine. (Credit: Smith Collection/Getty Images).

Around the mid 1880s, scientists were able to isolate the agile ingredient of the coca foliage, Erythroxylon coca (later known as cocaine). Pharmaceutical companies loved this new, fast-acting and relatively-cheap stimulant.

In 1884, an Austrian ophthalmologist, Carl Koller, discovered that a few drops of cocaine solution put on a patient'southward cornea acted as a topical anesthetic. It made the eye immobile and de-sensitized to hurting, and caused less bleeding at the site of incision—making eye surgery much less risky. News of this discovery spread, and soon cocaine was being used in both eye and sinus surgeries. Marketed as a treatment for toothaches, low, sinusitis, sluggishness, alcoholism, and impotence, cocaine was soon beingness sold as a tonic, lozenge, powder and even used in cigarettes. Information technology fifty-fifty appeared in Sears Roebuck catalogues. Popular domicile remedies, such as Allen's Cocaine Tablets, could be purchased for simply fifty cents a box and offered relief for everything from hay fever, catarrh, pharynx troubles, nervousness, headaches, and sleeplessness. In reality, the side effects of cocaine actually caused many of the ailments it claimed to cure—causing lack of slumber, eating bug, depression, and even hallucinations.

You didn't need a doctor'due south prescription to buy it. Some states sold cocaine at bars, and it was, famously, ane of the fundamental ingredients in the before long-to-be ubiquitous Coca-Cola soft drink. By 1902, in that location were an estimated 200,000 cocaine addicts in the U.S. lone. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotic Human action outlawed the production, importation, and distribution of cocaine.

three. Vibrators—Cure Your Hysteria

Handheld electric vibrator, 1909. (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images)

We have 19th-century doctors to thank for the introduction of the vibrator, which was first advertised equally a cure for a catch-all, female "illness" known as hysteria. Hysteria was believed to cause any number of maladies, including anxiety, irritability, sexual want, insomnia, faintness, and a swollen stomach—so almost every woman showed some symptoms. The status traced its roots back to ancient medical theories about "wandering wombs," where a displaced (and discontented) uterus caused female ill wellness.

The handling? A "pelvic massage" that would induce "hysterical paroxysm"—commonly known as an orgasm. This job lay with Victorian doctors who manually massaged women. In an effort to spare the doctors this work, one ingenious practitioner named Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville created a steam-powered, "electromechanical medical instrument." Nicknamed the "Manipulator," the device allowed women to give themselves dwelling massages, assuasive them to cure their "wandering wombs."

READ MORE: The 'Male parent of Modern Gynecology' Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women

4. Fen-Phen—A Miracle Pill for Weight Loss

Bottles of Phentermine and Fenfluramine, ordinarily known as Phen-Fen. (Credit: Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Today's weight-loss industry is an estimated $60 billion concern, a big portion of which is spent on diet pills. And while the first fat-busting pills went on the market in the late 1880s, no other pills accept had quite the speedy ascension and fall as Fen-Phen did in the 1990s.Originally released into the market as two separate drugs—the ambition suppressant Fenfluramine and the amphetamine Phentermine—they were marketed as short-term diet aids, but proved largely ineffective on their own. In the belatedly 1970s, however, the two products were combined by Dr. Michael Weintraub to create what became known every bit Fen-Phen. Weintraub conducted a single study with 121 patients over the course of four years. The patients, two-thirds of which were women, lost an average of 30 pounds with seemingly no side effects—merely Weintraub's study didn't monitor the patients' hearts. The new miracle drug was get-go introduced into the market in 1992, and people could not get enough of information technology. Some doctors, looking for a quick mode to make greenbacks, operated "fen-phen mills," where drastic patients looking to shed excess weight would pay anything for the pills. Before long, some six million Americans were using it.

In April 1996, later a contentious debate, the FDA agreed to approve the drug, pending a one-year trial. Almost immediately, reports of grave side effects started pouring in. That July, the Mayo Clinic said that 24 women taking fen-phen had adult serious heart valve abnormalities. Hundreds of more cases were reported, and by September 1997 the FDA had officially pulled fen-phen. In 1999, the American Home Products Corporation (the producers of fen-phen) agreed to pay a $3.75 billion settlement to those injured by taking the drug. More than 50,000 liability lawsuits were filed in the years following its withdrawal from the market place, and patients are still able to file injury claims.

5. Heroin—The Cure for a Cough

Pharmaceutical advertisement from a 1900 magazine, promoting the use of heroin for a cough. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

How exercise you cure one drug epidemic? Create a new drug. That's what happened in the late 1880s, when heroin was introduced as a safe and non-addictive substitute for morphine. Known equally diamorphine, it was created by an English chemic researcher named C.R. Alder Wright in the 1870s, just it wasn't until a chemist working for Bayer pharmaceuticals discovered Wright's paper in 1895 that the drug came to market.

Finding it to be 5 times more effective—and supposedly less addictive—than morphine, Bayer began advertising a heroin-laced aspirin in 1898, which they marketed towards children suffering from sore throats, coughs, and cold. Some bottles depicted children eagerly reaching for the medicine, with moms giving their sick kids heroin on a spoon. Doctors started to have an inkling that heroin may not be every bit non-addictive as it seemed when patients began coming dorsum for canteen after bottle. Despite the pushback from physicians and negative stories about heroin'southward side furnishings pilling up, Bayer connected to market and produce their product until 1913. Eleven years later, the FDA banned heroin altogether.

READ More than: Dr. John Kellogg Invented Cereal. Some of His Other Wellness Ideas Were Much Weirder

6. Lobotomies—Hacking Away Troubled Brains

Dr. Walter Freeman performing a lobotomy. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Walter Freeman thought he'd establish a style to convalesce the pain and distress of the mentally and emotionally ill. Instead, he created one of history's most horrific medical treatments. Freeman developed his procedure, which became known as a prefrontal lobotomy, based on earlier research by a Portuguese neurologist. Early versions of Freeman's "cure" involved drilling holes in the peak of his patients' skulls, and afterward evolved into hammering an water ice pick-like instrument through their eye sockets, to sever the connections betwixt the frontal lobes and the thalamus, which he believed to be the function of the brain that dealt with man emotion.Freeman presently teamed up with James Watts, and later practicing on cadavers, they performed their first procedure on a live patient in 1936, a woman who suffered from agitated depression and sleeplessness. It was accounted a success. But subsequent surgeries were non. Patients were frequently left in a vegetative state, experienced relapses, and regressed physically and emotionally. As many equally 15 percent died. One of the most infamous victims was Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of futurity President John F. Kennedy, who was left incapacitated and spent the rest of her life needing full-time care.

Freeman was as much a showman as he was a doctor, traveling to 23 states to demonstrate his miracle cure. In all, he performed some 3,439 lobotomies—some on patients not yet in their teens. And despite the obvious risks and lack of physical success rates, hospitals willingly let Freeman keep, perhaps because lobotomized patients were considered "easier" to bargain with. Everything changed in 1967, when Freeman performed a lobotomy on ane of his original patients, a housewife living in Berkeley, California. This time, he severed a blood vessel and Mortenson died of a brain hemorrhage—finally putting an end to Freeman's haphazard brain hacking.

vii. Shock Treatments—The Cure for Impotence

Electric belts featured in a Sears itemize, 1900.

The medical profession has had varying opinions on the causes, and possible cures, for impotence. The repressive Victorians honed in on a man'south "moral weakness" as the cause for genital dysfunction, and by the 19th century impotence was thought to be caused past either an excess of sex or masturbation, or too little of it. As surgeon Samuel W. Gross noted in his volume, Practical Treatise on Impotence, Sterility, and Centrolineal Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs, "masturbation, gonorrhea, sexual excesses, and constant excitement of the genital organs without gratification," would lead to impotence.

Some doctors introduced "galvanic baths," or bathtubs filled with electrodes, which were supposed to restore sexual want in just six sessions. Others took an even more localized approach, where rods with currents running through them were placed within the homo's urethra. The treatment would terminal for five to viii minutes and would be repeated one time or twice a week. This was thought to be particularly helpful for those with significant atrophy to the genital area.

Where a buck tin be fabricated off an insecure customer, so quack doctors and unsavory businessmen are sure to follow. By the late 1800s ads were running for "electropathic belts" or "electric belts" aimed at "weak men." They claimed to help cure kidney pains, sciatic nervus bug, backaches, headaches, and nervous burnout—simply the underlying message was they could cure men'southward sexual problems.

While today, impotence is seen as a alloy of physical and mental issues, the belief that electrical daze therapy is a useful cure for impotence all the same persists. Studies coming out of Haifa, Israel (2009) and San Francisco, California (2016) both claim there are claim to low-energy shock moving ridge therapy to cure erectile dysfunction.

phillipsstanter.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.history.com/news/7-of-the-most-outrageous-medical-treatments-in-history

Share this post