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    What the Apothecary Ordered: Questionable Cures Through the Ages
    What the Apothecary Ordered: Questionable Cures Through the Ages
    What the Apothecary Ordered: Questionable Cures Through the Ages
    Ebook154 pages41 minutes

    What the Apothecary Ordered: Questionable Cures Through the Ages

    By Caroline Rance

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Troubled by toothache? Dogged by dipsomania? Perhaps you have been poisoned or accidentally got a bottle stuck up your bottom? This compendium of tried and tested (and terrifying) historical remedies is your go-to guide for how not to seek medical relief. From smearing mouse-dung on your teeth to drinking sulphuric acid, and from mechanical chin-reducing contraptions to 'super-super-excellent' quack medicines, here are to be found the most bizarre and alarming remedies of the last two thousand years. Spanning Ancient Greece and twentieth century Britain and America, What the Apothecary Ordered positively haemorrhages with the dangerous ministrations of 'healers' of yore. Everyday illnesses, beauty, surgery, sexual performance and madness – whatever the nature of the malady, here the reader will find a cautionary tale about entrusting oneself to the experts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 10, 2014
    ISBN9781783660278
    What the Apothecary Ordered: Questionable Cures Through the Ages
    Author

    Caroline Rance

    Caroline Rance is studying for an MA in Medicine, Science, and Society at Birkbeck College, University of London and writes the successful blog "The Quack Doctor," which has been shortlisted twice for the Medgadget medical blog awards. Her novel, set in an 18th-century hospital, was published in 2009. She regularly speaks on quacks and quackery and lives in Buckinghamshire.

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    • 4/5
      It's a fun quick read! My only complaint is that I wish the pictures had captions, a lot of them make little to no sense without them.

    Book preview

    What the Apothecary Ordered - Caroline Rance

    CHAPTER

    I

    DESPERATE REMEDIES

    Of annoying ailments and deadly diseases

    BLEEDING AT THE NOSE

    Father Schott the Jesuit says, that to stop a Bleeding at the Nose, you need only to hold to the Nose the Dung of an Ass very hot, wrap’d up in an Handkerchief, upon the plea that the Smell will presently stop it. Wecher did the same with Hogs Dung very hot done up in fine Taffeta, and put into the nose.

    – Recreations Mathematical and Physical, 1708

    THE ANTI-PESTILENTIAL QUILT

    This quilt must be worn at the Pit of the Stomach, next the Skin; which may easily be contrived by hanging it over the Neck with a Ribband or Fillet, and tying it close to the Stomach by another Ribband going round the Body.

    Care must be taken to pull off the Quilt every Week, and to dry it gradually by the Fire; not too near, but sufficiently so that the Heat may draw from it all the Moisture which it shall have attracted from the Body by Insensible Perspiration.

    It is by this insensible Perspiration, effected by the Quilt, that the Blood purges itself of malignant Humours, the Retention of which often occasions melancholy Diseases, and especially the Small Pox.

    – Manner of Wearing the Anti-Pestilential Quilt, c. 1780

    SNEEZING

    Sneezing, provoked by a feather, relieves heaviness in the head; it is said too, that to touch the nostrils of a mule with the lips, will arrest sneezing and hiccup.

    – Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, c. AD 77–79

    FOR THE AGUE

    A small living spider should be rolled up in a cobweb, then put into a lump of butter and eaten while the fit is on. Pills, also, may be made of the cobwebs in which the eggs remain, and taken daily for three days; after which time it would be dangerous to continue the treatment.

    – Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, 1890

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