You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [65]
Some seventy thousand people were lobotomized before somebody figured out that driving a spike into the brain probably was not the answer to all of life’s problems.
5. TREPANATION
Like the lobotomy’s old, senile grandfather, trepanation is basically a fancy word for drilling holes in your head. It’s also the oldest surgical procedure known to man. Trepanation holes were found in 40 of 120 human skulls discovered at a prehistoric burial site in France estimated to be eight thousand years old.
Most commonly used as a treatment for seizures and migraines in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was also used as an extreme form of cosmetic/experimental body modification amongst several pre-Columbian American societies. Nobody’s quite sure why the French cavemen did it. Probably because they’d just invented tools and nobody’d invented any furniture for them to put together yet.
4. URINE THERAPY
You can tell by the title of this entry that we’re not heading anywhere good. Throughout history there have been those who believed the key to good health was wallowing in one’s own excretions. Urine was said to cure an endless list of ailments and to promote good health if consumed, was applied to the skin and, yes, some even used it to give themselves (turn away now weak of heart) a nice bracing urine enema.
Perhaps the best part of this is that, unlike the other practices listed here, urine therapy lives on today. Of all the crack-pot theories listed here, the one that endured is the one where people drink and bathe in piss.
There’s absolutely no evidence that urine therapy can cure a damn thing, though there is conclusive evidence proving that it can absolutely make you smell like old people.
3. BLOODLETTING
Bloodletting was one of the most enduring and popular medical practices in history, originated by the Greeks and used up until the nineteenth century for, well, basically everything. If you were feeling under the weather back in the day, there’s a good chance it was because you just had too much blood.
A person having too much blood may sound absurd, but that’s just because you don’t know about the four humors. The theory was that the body was filled with blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile and that an imbalance of the four fluids was the root of all illness. Apparently, blood could be a bit of a space hog, and thus patients were bled to make room for more fun stuff like black bile (diarrhea).
If you’re wondering what made people think this worked for so long, the next time you’re at death’s door with the flu go out and give up to four quarts of blood. We can assure you your flu won’t be cured, but you’ll probably feel a lot better as you take a delirious blood-loss-inspired trip through the clouds!
2. HARD-CORE DIET REMEDIES
While fuller figures have been popular for most of history, during the twentieth—or “no fat chicks”—century, thin was in for women. This need to be slim led to the creation of countless so-called diet pills.
While a lot of the pills actually did help with weight loss, they also caused fevers, heart troubles, blindness, death, and birth defects. In the 1950s and 1960s, women liked diet pills so darn much that they just couldn’t seem to stop taking them. This was because the diet pills of the ’50s and ’60s were in actuality bottles of pure crank. But hey, what’s being a nervous, amphetamine-addicted wreck when being ready for bathing suit season hangs in the balance?
1. FEMALE HYSTERIA CURES
Women and their mood swings—right, guys? Now, if you happen to be female don’t be offended, there’s no shame in admitting to the occasional bit of moodiness (or irritability or anxiousness or a ton of other things) as according to nineteenth-century doctors it’s a