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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

37. Washing Oneself With Urine

Medieval Flemish dyers, like other dyers, used urine to develop and fix their product. Pintrest

Since ancient times, urine was collected for a variety of uses, such as whitening cloth, developing and fixing dyes, and tanning leather. During the Black Death, many came to believe that urine had healing properties. So they soaked themselves in the stuff.

Plague victims were bathed in urine several times a day, in the belief that doing so would either cure them, or at least alleviate the symptoms. Of course, it did not do such thing – it just caused them to spend their final hours badly stinking. However, urine did not cause them to stink anywhere near as bad as the next cure.

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.