Medicine Has Come a Very, Very Long Way
Today’s Way Back Wednesday features 10 medical practices that have largely disappeared from modern medicine — and some of them make a questionable bottle of old-timey tonic look downright reasonable.
Via MsMojo, the countdown revisits treatments once promoted or used in medicine before research, regulation and better therapies pushed them into the history books.
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THE STRANGER SIDE OF MEDICAL HISTORY
From medicated cigarettes to invasive procedures once considered legitimate treatment, this Way Back Wednesday is a reminder of how dramatically medicine can change.
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One of the more head-spinning examples involves smoking as an asthma treatment. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, physicians and patients used medicated cigarettes and powders containing substances such as stramonium because inhaled smoke was believed to relieve bronchial spasms.
Yes, smoke. For asthma.
It sounds upside down now, but the treatment reflected the medical understanding and limited options available at the time. As newer medicines emerged and doctors better understood airway inflammation — and the harms of smoke itself — those smoking remedies gradually fell out of favor.
When Extreme Treatments Were Considered Cutting Edge
The episode also ventures into the era of psychosurgery and lobotomy, procedures that were once introduced as serious medical interventions for psychiatric and neurological problems before their severe limitations and consequences became impossible to ignore.
That context matters. These practices were not simply the product of everyone in the past having “zero education.” Many emerged from the scientific theories, technology and evidence available in their own period. Some were embraced by respected physicians before later research exposed their risks, shortcomings or deeply troubling consequences.
And that may be the most interesting part of looking back at old medicine: today’s obvious bad idea was not always obvious to the people living through it.
So get some brain juice ready for a historical serving of cures, procedures and ideas that modern medicine has mostly left behind. Some are strange. Some are unsettling. And a few will probably make you extremely grateful to be booking your doctor’s appointment in the 2020s.
Watch MsMojo Count Down 10 Medical Practices No Longer Commonly Used
MsMojo’s video looks back at a selection of historical treatments and medical practices that have since been abandoned, replaced or sharply restricted as medical knowledge evolved.
Source: MsMojo; historical context cross-checked against peer-reviewed medical-history literature.
