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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

13. Urine and Poo to Cure the Black Death

Lancing buboes – before stuffing them with a poo-based paste. Center for the Study of Medicine and Body in the Renaissance

Unsurprisingly, urine neither cured the plague nor alleviated its symptoms. It just caused victims to spend their final hours badly stinking. However, urine did not cause them to stink anywhere near as bad as this next remedy. The Black Death often caused pus filled swellings, known as buboes, to erupt all over the skin. One remedy was to lance, or open the buboes to allow the disease to leave the body. So far, so not too bad. Then a special potion was 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 ghastly 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.