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When Opium Was a Cure-All Remedy, and Other Unusual Historic Medical Cures

Khalid Elhassan April 10, 2025 16 min

Remedy - Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague — Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague. Pits Perilous

Tobacco was once believed to be a cure-all remedy for just about every ailment. And sniffing farts was thought to ward off the plague. Before the scientific method revolutionized the medical profession, a lot of medicine throughout history was just trial and error and guesswork. That led to some weird cures that contemporaries nonetheless swore by. Below are twenty of history’s strangest health remedies.

20. Civil War Doctors Prescribed Opium as a Cure-All Remedy

Remedy - A Union field hospital full of wounded and weary soldiers after The Seven Days Battles — A Union field hospital full of wounded and weary soldiers after The Seven Days Battles. Encyclopedia Britannica

Doctors during the US Civil War were ignorant of antiseptic practices to prevent infections. However, thanks to the recent invention of the hypodermic needle, coupled with the discovery of morphine decades earlier, they could at least do something to ease wounded soldiers’ pain. When hypodermic needles and morphine were unavailable, opium pills were in plentiful supply – at least in Union hospitals. So soldiers were often dosed with massive amounts of morphine or opium to deaden the pain of amputations, other surgeries, and various ailments. Plenty of wartime accounts highlighted that liberality of drug dispensation. One Union doctor diagnosed wounded soldiers from horseback, and if any needed morphine, he would pour a dose on his hand, and have the soldier lick it. On the Confederate side, one Rebel doctor was known to give any patient a plug of opium, depending on whether or not he was constipated.

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.