Quiz

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Health

Medical advancement has been a crazy ride, y'all.

Os avanços médicos têm sido uma louca jornada, pessoal.

Se você acertar pelo menos 8 das 11 questões neste teste, você é um especialista em história médica

If You Get Over 8/11 On This Quiz Then You're A Medical History Expert

Are These Historical Medical Treatments Real Or Fake?

A procedure that started with the Ancient Egyptians and stuck around until the 19th century. It involved removing sometimes large quantities of blood from the body — usually by cutting into the vein in the forearm, but also by applying leeches — in order to treat all sorts of illnesses, including the plague, smallpox, and epilepsy. Doctors did this because they believed illnesses were caused by an imbalance in bodily fluids, and that by removing blood, it would restore balance.

Eventually, doctors realized that removing a patient's blood only made them sicker — or killed them — so they stopped performing the treatment. That said, it's still performed occasionally (using modern techniques!), to treat conditions like hemochromatosis, which results in excess iron in the body. And sterile leeches are sometimes used to drain excess blood in some parts of the body, for example, after surgery.

It was real.

Performed for thousands of years, from prehistoric times into the 19th century, trepanation was a procedure where doctors would drill or create a hole in a patient's skull to expose the brain — often without pain medicine or anesthesia. It was believed that doing so would help treat hysteria and psychosis.

When doctors found out it wasn't an effective psychiatric treatment, they stopped using it for this purpose. However, iterations of the procedure are still used today to relieve pressure in patients' skulls when there's bleeding or swelling.

In the late 1800s, before discovering that yellow fever was caused by a virus spread by mosquitoes, doctors would bathe their patients in cold milk baths hoping that they would cool the patients down while also extracting the sickness through osmosis.

I made it up. But yellow fever was actually found to be transmitted by mosquitoes in the early 1900s, and nearly 30 years later scientists discovered that a virus was responsible.

This never happened.

Thought to cure stuttering and other speech defects, hemiglossectomies involved cutting off half or a part of the tongue. It was mostly practiced during the medieval era but continued until the 17th century, before it was ended for being inhumane and ineffective.

It was also done with crude instruments and no anesthesia — HARSH. Today, glossectomies might be done (under anesthesia) only when a patient has mouth cancer or another oral disease.

During the height of WWI, factory workers making weapons like shells and bullets worked long hours, and it was often hot. To combat the excessive sweating from these conditions, their doctors would tell them to rub wax in the areas most affected by sweat. This clogged the pores temporarily and reduced sweating significantly.

This was not real.

Coming from ancient Indian medicine, urine therapy was based on the belief that urine was the filtered and purified "gold of the blood." So people would drink their own urine and massage it into their skin to treat stings, minor illnesses, and even some cancers.

Maybe they realized that it was just a human waste product, maybe they didn't. But either way, urine therapy ended around the 19th century — although people still believe that peeing on a jellyfish sting is an adequate treatment. [It's not](https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolinekee/does-pee-help-jellyfish-stings).

A procedure from the late 1800s that involved injecting a saline solution into a person’s neck and then shocking their brains (specifically the cerebellum) with small currents of electricity. It was believed that the currents would stimulate the growth of neural connections and improve a person’s IQ — the saline solution served as a conduit for the electrical currents to reach the brain.

This wasn't real.

Similar to those ab stimulator belts that exist today — y'know, the ones that [don't actually give you six-pack abs](https://www.buzzfeed.com/robstott/absolutely-fabulous-news) — the electric belt consisted of several battery cells linked around a belt, and capable of delivering electric currents and stimulation to the abdomen in order to promote digestion and treat erectile dysfunction (ED).

Created in 1850 and phased out as a medical treatment in the 1950s, the belt was sold by quack doctors to unknowing people who dealt with ED.

This was real.

Patients — specifically those with pulmonary tuberculosis — were told to take "air baths" first, for as little as five minutes per day, before increasing their exposure to fresh air over time. Then, once "habituated to the air for a period of an hour or more," they could begin taking "sun baths" (heliotherapy), while also increasing their exposure each day. Once acclimated, patients could expose themselves to the sun for as long as necessary as long as they weren't getting sunburned. This exposure was believed to improve symptoms.

Although never proven to actually work, a [paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655760/?page=5) on the subject from 1928 suggested the sun could potentially stimulate the production of vitamins and antibodies. More recent research has suggested that moderate sun exposure may have helped the immune system by spurring vitamin D production, However, the only known way to cure tuberculosis is by using antibiotics.

Believe it or not, this was real.

In 1665, during the Great Plague of London, doctors believed that the illness was caused by deadly vapors in the air. They thought that these vapors could be fought through exposure to equally foul-smelling vapors, so they told their patients to fart in jars. When the plague reached the patients' towns, they could open their jars and inhale the gas inside.

Medical knowledge was nowhere near where it is today, so obviously it didn't work. But hey, whatever let them sleep at night.

First described in the 5th century BCE, the Hippocratic bench was one of the first forms of treatment for spinal deformities, including scoliosis. Depending on what needed fixing, patients would lie down on the table, have certain parts of their lower and upper bodies tied with rope or bands, and then have the ropes pulled upward and downward in an effort to stretch the spine straight.

Welp, I thought I had made it up, but this was actually [real](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0009922815615829?journalCode=cpja). Also known as the scamnum, the Hippocratic bench was further developed by physicians later on, including Galen of Pergamon (129 to circa 200 CE), who coined the term scoliosis and tailored treatment on it based on the individual curvature of patients' spines. (The bench was also the precursor to the torture device, the rack). Many doctors today consider the scamnum to be the forerunner of traction devices used in orthopedics and neurosurgery.

This was real!

But don't worry about it. Just be glad you weren't part of the "testing" phase for so many of our modern day treatments.

You don't know much about historical medical treatments.

Really cool! Or not, depending on how cringey it was for you.

You know a few medical treatments from history.

Whoa, you know a lot about medical treatments from history.

BuzzFeed

Os avanços da medicina têm sido uma louca jornada.

Quais desses procedimentos loucos já foram normais na história da medicina?

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If You Get Over 8/11 On This Quiz Then You're A Medical History Expert

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