Ancient Health Remedies: Time-Tested Cures

A dead man's hand for bible cysts

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In 1743, German anatomist Lorenz Heister published about Bible cyst treatment for hands and wrists. It included tying an animal-killing bullet to the cyst or stroking it with a corpse's hand. One of his treatments—hitting it with a heavy book—is still used today.

Cigarettes to treat your chronic asthma

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During the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, asthma cigarettes were apparently very popular. These cigarettes contained a number of harmful substances, such as stramonium, belladonna, and tobacco. Seems counter-intuitive!

Pickled sheep's eyes for any hangover

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Back in the days of Genghis Khan, the Mongols believed that eating pickled sheep's eyeballs for breakfast was the best way to cure a hangover. The ritual is still carried out today, albeit it is customary to wash the eyes down with tomato juice afterward.

Or just try tea made from poop or owl eggs

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According to urban legend, a common hangover remedy in the Wild West was tea made from rabbit feces. Pliny, on the other hand, recommended that people drink wine mixed with owl eggs for three days straight to get rid of a hangover. Think I'll just stick with the hangover.

Poo ointment for bad wounds

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Animal waste was used as a medicine in ancient Egypt apparently. Many types of feces, including dog, gazelle, and donkey, were used to both heal wounds and ward off evil spirits. Crocodile dung was used as a contraceptive by some women who believed it would keep the sperm from fertilizing the egg.

Mercury to help with syphilis

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Mercury, ingested or administered, was the main syphilis therapy from the 16th to the 20th centuries and it also treated constipation. Lewis and Clark's soldiers took so many mercury chloride pills that historians and archaeologists can locate their camps by mercury levels. Doctors utilized mercury to cure syphilis despite knowing about mercury toxicity.

Old sour cream for dry hands

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Dry hands have always been an issue and Dr. Ritter offers an intriguing remedy for chapped hands, which is as follows: Wrap some sour cream in a cloth, bury it in the yard for the night, and then the next day, remove the cloth, unearth the sour cream, and use it.

Milkweed for your warts

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In 1826, the white sap from this widespread weed was thought to be a good treatment for warts. But it can be an irritant, so don't try it yourself. Yet, Biochemist Dr. Jim Aylward's garden in Australia has milkweed from Europe. "My mum grew it for 20 years and swore by it," he recalls. "She always told me to put it on my skin to help sunspots."

Raw veal to help cure rabies

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Rabies was thought to be curable at the time of the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder recommended treating a bite from a furious dog by cutting open the wound and covering it with raw veal. The next step is to have the patient consume a diet of lime and hog's fat, followed by a mixture of wine and cooked badger excrement. Nice!

Saffron to help you sober up

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The Red Book of Hergest, a Welsh manuscript from 1382, provides herbal treatments for drunkenness, including "eating bruised saffron with spring water." However, the author did warn about eating too much of it and dying of "excessive joy." Sounds like a treat.

Leeches to remove excess blood

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Leeches were a more civilized technique of bloodletting, a popular sickness treatment back in the day. Draining extra blood was the greatest solution to savor Hippocrates' four bodily humors. Bloodletting flourished in 1830's Europe when France imported 40 million leeches annually to treat practically all diseases.

Boiled carrots help with your asthma

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The British missionary John Wesley recommended "a fortnight on boiled carrots only" as a treatment for asthma in his book Primitive Physick, which was first published in the late 1740s. The book was written as an easy and natural method of curing most diseases.

C*caine to help with your hay fever

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Dr. Thomas Jefferson Ritter's 1910 book Mother’s Remedies includes many outdated remedies, like spraying a "four-percent solution of c*caine" up the nose for hay fever. In those days, c*caine was given for indigestion, weariness, eye strain, and hemorrhoids.

Or maybe to help with your depression

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It is widely thought that Sigmund Freud made significant contributions to the field of psychology. But he constantly recommended c*caine to his patients and his reputation suffered as a result. A variety of medical professionals in the 19th century advocated for the use of c*caine as a treatment for a variety of illnesses, including toothaches, depression, and migraines.

Radium for any arthritis

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Radium treatment was once widely accepted. It happened to treat arthritis, impotence, and ageing. The Revigator, a water-radium crock from the early 20th century, was in hundreds of thousands of American homes. No surprise: radium causes radiation illness, not ageing.

Python bile for genital ulcers

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Animal bile was at one time utilized in Chinese medicine for the purpose of treating a variety of illnesses. The World Journal of Gastroenterology is cited as a Reliable Source stating that python bile was "employed externally to treat ulcers of the external female genitalia."

Willow for pain relief

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Ancient Egyptians and Hippocrates prescribed willow bark for pain treatment and thought it was extremely effective. Well, apparently it is. A 1763 Royal Society research proved its efficacy and recent advances have proved it is much more than a painkiller.

Snowdrops to help with Alzheimer's disease

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Galantamine, extracted from snowdrops and used to treat Alzheimer's disease, was first studied by the Soviet Union, although traditional medicine says Bulgarians rub the blossoms on their foreheads to relieve headaches. I wonder if it actually did the job!

Snail slime to treat all kinds of warts

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According to the University of Oxford, snails would do their slime walk over a wart, someone would stab the snail to death (usually with a thorn), and then while the snail withered away and died, so too would the wart. Who knew that warts were so easily treated?

Whitening teeth with urine

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Are you sick of spending money on toothpaste? You might try brushing your teeth with urine that has a high concentration of ammonia and draw inspiration from ancient Romans. According to Smithsonian, Roman physicians and poets believed that urinating, which is completely cost-free could make your teeth sparkle.

Vinegar to calm your heart palpitations

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Back in the 1700's, they took on a primitive and strange process to treat those with chronic heart palpitations. John Wesley advised that sufferers should drink a pint of cold water or apply a rag dipped wholly in vinegar to help with their heart problems.

Nux vomica for your headaches

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Dr. Ritter recommended taking a drop of nux vomica tincture in a teaspoon of water for specific types of headaches. Nux vomica is now widely recognized as the principal source of strychnine, a toxin widely used in rat poison. Sounds safe, doesn't it!

Eyes of a crab for swollen eyes

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The eyes of a live crab should be removed, the crab should then be thrown back into the ocean, and the crab's eyes should be placed "on the neck of the man who hath need." This is how Bald's recommends treating inflamed eyes. Sounds very legitimate doesn't it!

Powdered hair and dried bones for epilepsy

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Apparently, people cooked strong man's hair with a deer leg-bone, powdered it, and consumed it before the new moon. People have long questioned whether the moon influences seizures. In 2004, Epilepsy and Behaviour published “The influence of the full moon on seizure frequency: myth or reality?"

Periwinkle flowers to treat cataracts

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The British Library in London is the sole location where a copy of Bald's Leechbook, a medical textbook that dates back to the early 10th century is kept. It is recommended that honey and charred periwinkle blossoms be placed in the eyes in order to treat cataracts.

Hot irons for hemorrhoids

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Put the sitz bath out of your mind. According to documents from the Middle Ages, surgeons in the 12th century would cure severe hemorrhoids by removing the hemorrhoids with a cauterize iron. Doesn't sound painful whatsoever does it? Think Anusol will do!

Just a word for Malaria

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Patients were instructed to write Abracadabra repeatedly on a piece of paper with one less letter on each line until the letters formed a triangle with an A at the bottom. After nine days, they had to throw the paper into an east-running brook. If that failed, they were to rub themselves with lion fat.

H*roin for a kid's cough

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These days, most people think of Bayer when they hear the word aspirin. However, throughout the 1920s, a German pharmaceutical advertised h*roin as a cure for coughs in children. This makes little sense until you learn that Bayer's parent firm assisted the Nazis in the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

Powdered bodies to help treat bruises

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Europe used human bodies in medicine increasingly in the 16th and 17th centuries. They even appeared in headache and epilepsy treatments. When Egyptian tombs were robbed for bodies, if you had a bruise or other ailment, you were instructed to apply it or swallow it as a powder.

Electricity to cure your toothaches

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John Wesley also recommends electrifying people who are experiencing tooth pain. Epilepsy, paralysis, impotence, tapeworms, and other conditions were treated using electrotherapy, which was a novel concept in the 1700's but was widely utilized until the early 1900's.