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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

36. Smearing Oneself With Poop

A medieval doctor bleeding a patient. Fine Art America

The Black Death often caused pus-filled swellings, known as buboes, to erupt all over the skin. One treatment called for lancing open the buboes to allow the disease to leave the body. So far, so not so bad. Then a special potion was to be applied to the lanced buboes. A potion in which poo featured prominently.

The cuts made in the plague victims’ bodies were slathered with a concoction of tree resin, white lily roots, and human excrement. The stinking paste was pushed and packed firmly into the open wounds, then tightly wrapped to keep the nauseating mixture inside.

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.