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People Tried Unworkable Methods to Ward off Illness Outbreaks in History

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2020 33 min

Physician - Goat gland — Brinkley's hospital operating room. Imgur

4. The Healing Properties of Poop

Ancient Egyptians swore by the healing properties of gazelle, donkey, dog, and fly dung, and the ability of those animals’ droppings to ward off evil spirits. They also used animal poop to heal their wounds. On the one hand, that might have caused tetanus and other infections on occasion, especially when applying poop to wounds. On the other hand, the microflora in some animal dung contains antibiotics, so the remedy might actually have worked every now and then.

The ancient Greeks borrowed a lot from the Egyptians, including the medical prescription for using crocodile poop as birth control. Ancient Greek women believed that inserting crocodile dung in their vaginas would serve as a powerful contraceptive. Who knows: perhaps it actually worked. At least in the sense that encountering a vagina full of crocodile poop might have been such a huge turn off that it averted sex from occurring in the first place.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.