8 Medical Treatments From History That Would Horrify Doctors Today

For more than two thousand years, draining blood from a patient’s body was the go-to treatment for almost everything: fever, seizures, pneumonia, even a simple sore throat. The logic came from ancient Greek medicine’s “four humors” theory, which held that health depended on keeping blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile in balance. Too much blood? Open a vein and let it flow. The practice was so mainstream that barbers performed it alongside haircuts — the red-and-white striped barber pole symbolizes bloody bandages wrapped around the poles patients gripped during the procedure.

The most famous victim was America’s first president. When George Washington fell ill with a throat infection in December 1799, his physicians removed roughly 40 percent of his blood over the course of a single day. He was dead within hours. We now know he likely had acute epiglottitis, a bacterial infection that bloodletting could only worsen. By the mid-1800s, germ theory and better clinical observation finally persuaded most physicians to put down the lancet — but not before countless patients paid dearly for the profession’s slow change of mind.

Mercury was, for centuries, practically a universal medicine. Physicians prescribed it for syphilis, skin diseases, constipation, and even as a diuretic. Patients swallowed calomel (mercurous chloride) pills, rubbed mercurial ointments into their skin, and sat in fumigation chambers where the vapors were inhaled directly. The idea was that the profuse salivation, sweating, and purging mercury induced were signs the body was expelling illness. What was actually happening was slow, systematic poisoning of the nervous system.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” traces to this era — hat-makers who used mercury nitrate to shape felt absorbed enough of the metal through their skin and lungs to develop tremors, memory loss, and erratic behavior. Patients on long-term mercury treatments fared no better: teeth fell out, gums turned black, and chronic neurological damage accumulated with each dose. Mercury continued appearing in prescription medicines well into the twentieth century, and trace amounts persisted in some vaccines and antiseptics even longer, a legacy that still sparks debate today.

In 1936, American neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States, severing the connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain as a treatment for severe mental illness. Freeman eventually simplified the procedure so radically that he could perform it in a doctor’s office with a modified ice pick inserted through the eye socket — no operating room, no general anesthesia, sometimes no surgical training for the person watching. He performed some 3,439 of these procedures over his career, including on patients still in their early teens.

The results were catastrophic for many. As many as 15 percent of patients died on the operating table. Survivors were often left passive, incontinent, or unable to function independently. One of the most famous patients was Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, who was left permanently incapacitated after a lobotomy at age 23. Freeman continued performing the procedure until 1967, when one of his patients died after a blood vessel was severed during the operation. The development of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s had already made the lobotomy medically obsolete — it just took the profession time to admit it.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, radium was the wonder element. Scientists were dazzled by its mysterious glow and energetic emissions, and the medical establishment quickly decided that anything so powerful must be therapeutic. Radium-infused products flooded the market: water crocks that charged your drinking water with radiation overnight, chocolates, face creams, toothpaste, and suppositories. The product Radithor — essentially radium dissolved in distilled water — sold for about a dollar a bottle and was endorsed by doctors who saw patients reporting temporary surges of energy (a classic side effect of early radiation exposure).

The most notorious case was Eben Byers, a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist and former U.S. amateur golf champion who drank an estimated 1,400 bottles of Radithor over about two years, convinced it was curing his ailments. By 1931, his jaw had to be surgically removed and his skull was literally disintegrating. He died in 1932, and was buried in a lead-lined coffin at Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. When his remains were exhumed in 1965, they were still highly radioactive. A Wall Street Journal headline at the time of his death captured the arc with grim economy: “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Fell Off.”

In 1898, the pharmaceutical giant Bayer — yes, the same company that makes aspirin — began marketing a new compound called heroin as a safe, non-addictive alternative to morphine. The drug was even named for the German word heroisch (heroic) to suggest its powerful benefits. Bayer advertised heroin-laced syrup for children’s coughs, sore throats, and colds, with print ads showing mothers administering it to sick children. It was sold over the counter at pharmacies and available in Sears Roebuck catalogs alongside seeds and sewing patterns.

Physicians prescribed it enthusiastically, and patients came back for more — repeatedly, urgently, mysteriously unable to stop. Doctors grew suspicious of the pattern but Bayer kept producing heroin until 1913. By then, the damage was done: addiction rates were climbing across the country. The FDA finally banned heroin outright in 1924. The episode is a textbook illustration of how financial incentives can keep a dangerous product on the market long after the warning signs are obvious to anyone paying attention.

Before cocaine became a controlled substance, it was a celebrated medical tool. In 1884, Austrian ophthalmologist Carl Koller discovered that a few drops of cocaine solution could numb the cornea completely — suddenly, eye surgery was far less excruciating. Dentists adopted it for tooth extractions, surgeons used it as a local anesthetic, and physicians prescribed it for toothaches, depression, sinusitis, hay fever, alcoholism, and impotence. Sigmund Freud was an enthusiastic promoter, publishing papers praising its therapeutic effects while also consuming it himself.

Cocaine appeared in Allen’s Cocaine Tablets (50 cents a box), in throat lozenges, in pediatric teething syrups, and — most famously — as an original ingredient in Coca-Cola, which marketed itself as a brain tonic and nerve stimulant. By 1902, an estimated 200,000 Americans were addicted. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 effectively outlawed its production and distribution, but for nearly three decades it had been a fixture of mainstream medicine. Your great-grandparents almost certainly encountered it without knowing what it was.

Through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, tobacco companies ran aggressive advertising campaigns featuring physicians as spokesmen for the health benefits of cigarettes. In 1927, the American Tobacco Company claimed that 11,105 physicians had endorsed Lucky Strike as “less irritating” to sensitive throats — a figure that somehow ballooned to 20,679 physicians in later ads. The company had sent doctors free cartons of cigarettes and asked them a single leading question: whether Luckies were less irritating than other brands. Philip Morris ran ads in the late 1930s claiming that its blend of tobacco was so mild that a doctor-sponsored study had proven it caused fewer throat irritations.

Camel cigarettes ran one of the most brazen campaigns of all, with the slogan “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette,” which ran for years in popular magazines. Tobacco companies sponsored physicians’ lounges at medical conventions and provided free samples to keep the medical profession’s image tightly wrapped around the product. The Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 report linking cigarettes to lung cancer finally ended the charade — but by then, a generation of smokers had taken up the habit partly because a man in a white coat had told them it was fine.

Thalidomide was introduced in West Germany in 1957 as a sedative and was quickly embraced across Europe and Canada as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women. It seemed almost too good: patients reported sleeping better with fewer side effects than with existing sedatives, and the drug was marketed as so safe it was sold over the counter. By the late 1950s it had been approved or was under review in dozens of countries, and the manufacturer was pressing the FDA hard to approve it in the United States.

One person stood between America and a full-blown catastrophe: Dr. Frances Kelsey, a newly hired FDA medical reviewer who had been on the job for just one month when the application landed on her desk in 1960. She found the safety data inadequate and refused to approve it despite intense pressure from the drug company and even from her own superiors. Her instincts proved devastating in their accuracy: by 1961, reports from Germany and the U.K. confirmed that thalidomide was causing phocomelia — severe limb malformations — in babies whose mothers had taken it during early pregnancy. Between 5,000 and 10,000 children worldwide were affected. Just 17 American cases were documented, from doctors’ samples. Kelsey received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962, and the scandal led directly to stronger drug-testing laws.