Quackery
The symbol for the god Mercury was the caduceus—two snakes entwined on a winged rod. The symbol is commonly and incorrectly associated with the medical establishment, due to a mistake when the US Army Medical Corps adopted the symbol in 1902. Soon after, it became a ubiquitous sign of healing. But in fact, the caduceus represents Mercury—the god of financial gain, commerce, thieves, and trickery.
The Rod of Asclepius, which has a single serpent entwined on a simple rod, was held by the Greek god Asclepius, the patron of health and healing. This was the rod mistakenly missed in 1902 and is currently used by most academic medical establishments today.
abbreviation on the periodic table of elements, Sb, derives from stibnite, the sulfide mineral form of antimony. A light metallic gray that turns black when exposed to air, stibnite was used around the eyes in ancient Egypt, the Middle East, and parts of Asia (where it is known as kohl).
Nowadays, activated charcoal is given to adsorb toxins in the stomach, and chelation therapies can bind them up in the blood
A favorite among murderers, white arsenic is produced by roasting the arsenic sulfide mineral. arsenic is a potent liver toxin and a carcinogen. A lethal dose (around 100 mg) will usually render the victim dead within several hours.
Why was arsenic the go-to poison for everyone, from housewives to emperors? For starters, it’s virtually undetectable. Its most famous form, “white arsenic,” is odorless and, when concealed in food and drink, often tasteless. The symptoms are also helpfully similar to food poisoning.
It’s an escharotic, which means it causes the skin surface to die and slough off. So in conditions where the skin is abnormally thickened, like psoriasis, it worked,
The rich who ingested enough silver from their spoons that it changed their skin color were known as “blue-bloods.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner was a mere twenty-one years old when he successfully extracted morphine from the gums and waxes inside the poppy pod. It was 1806. He wasn’t even trained in chemistry, only apprenticed to a pharmacist since he was sixteen. His equipment was crude, but he persevered. He called his newly discovered compound principium somniferum for the sleep-making principle within opium.
And in the 1850s, just when we thought opium had reached its most potent, accessible form, Alexander Wood invented the modern hypodermic syringe. Injected morphine was stronger and required a far smaller dose. As a result, use became even more widespread, especially in the middle and upper classes because morphine, syringes, and needle kits were expensive.
In 1874 London, a pharmacist named Charles Romley Alder Wright was searching to create a version of morphine without the addictive qualities. His new opiate, diacetylmorphine, was shockingly potent, but it took another decade before a German chemist working for Bayer Laboratories, Heinrich Dreser, would look to this drug as the winning racehorse that would be Bayer’s money-maker. He tested it on rabbits and frogs, and then thoughtfully tried it on employees at Bayer. They loved it. Some said it made them feel mighty, or heroisch (“heroic,” German).
They called it heroin.
By preventing the effective operation of glycine—the chemical that sends nerve signals to the muscles—a high dose of strychnine causes severe, painful muscle spasms. Left unchecked, these spasms build in frequency and strength, killing the victim within a few hours through either asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion from the brutal convulsions.
The strychnine alkaloid occurs naturally in the seeds of the strychnine tree (Strychnos nux-vomica), a deciduous tree native to India and Southeast Asia. The medium-sized tree grows to forty feet in height and looks rather innocently like an overgrown pear tree.
Bezoar is a solid mass of undigested food, plant fibers, or hair found in the digestive tracts of animals, including deer, porcupines, fish, and, yes, humans.
alexipharmics (poison antidotes).
N-acetylcysteine, fondly referred to as NAC by doctors, saves us from acetaminophen overdoses. Ethanol can treat antifreeze poisoning. Atropine, ironically one of the main components of
The modern barber pole, already becoming an antique in our day with its twirling red, blue, and white (or just red and white), is a throwback to these barber-surgeons, who placed the poles outside their place of work to advertise their vocation. The pole symbolized the stick that a patient would squeeze to facilitate the bleeding process, with a bowl at the bottom to catch the spilled liquid. Some say the white stripe symbolized the tourniquet, the blue represented the vein, and the red, blood.
Ptomaines are the chemicals—putrescine and cadaverine (tasty names!)— that make rotting things smell bad. From the Greek word ptoˉma for “fallen body” or “corpse,”
Writing in 1843, a French physician described the popularity of the pelvic douche among his female patients: “The reaction of the organism to the cold, which causes the skin to flush, and the reestablishment of equilibrium [author’s note: best orgasm euphemism ever] all create for many persons so agreeable a sensation that it is necessary to take precautions that they do not go beyond the prescribed time, which is usually four or five minutes.”
Hirudo medicinalis, the lofty Latin name for the common medical leech, was born to suck blood. For starters, its saliva contains a blood thinner (hirudin) that keeps blood from clotting and
In 1862, Mary Patterson was weak, emaciated, and depressed from spending much of her forty-two years sick and bedridden. Desperate for a cure, she limped her aching body up the stairs to the office of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in Portland, Maine. The newly energized Patterson learned everything she could from Quimby before developing her own medical system influenced by animal magnetism. She later got married and adopted the name history would remember her by: Mary Baker Eddy. Oh, and that little medical system she invented? It was the beginning of Christian Science, the largest healing faith ever produced in America, still going strong in 2017 with a global membership of about four hundred thousand people.
Mary modified the magnetic healing theories of Quimby and Mesmer to add a religious element: All disease is an illusion that can be cured by communion with God