Medicine In The 19th Century

Since the dawn of man, humans have dreaded the suffering caused by injuries and disease. For our benefit, we have enhanced the practices of Medicine and its techniques, but before such ideas existed; the risk of recovery was extremely traumatic and at times fatal. We have abandoned several of the medical procedures used in ancient times since intrepid scientists and physicians sought methods. Although medicine was not always a science, instead it was magic, thus god were trusted for a few techniques more than actual logic. Therefore, the history of medicine has been disturbing and dangerous, but a good number of its practices today used in a more modern way, is quite beneficial to humanity. Much of ancient medicine was shockingly obnoxious

For thousands of years the medical specialists believed that sickness was simply the result of a little “bad blood”. Influential physicians like Hippocrates and Galen stated that the human body was filled with four basic elements, or “humors”—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood—and these needed to be kept in balance to maintain proper health. As a result, doctors diagnosed patients that had a fever or other sicknesses with an overabundance of blood. To restore the balance the specialists would cut open a vein and drain some of their crucial fluids into a container until they felt it was no longer necessary. Furthermore, some instances used leeches to suck the blood straight from the skin. This method finally fell out of trend after innovative research showed that it might be doing more harm than good, still, leeching and controlled bloodletting are used today as treatments for assuring rare illnesses. For the benefits of it “The less blood that's available, the harder it is for the bacterium to scrounge up enough heme to thrive”, stated by Miranda Hitti author of Bloodletting's

For example, the Native Americans used a therapy involving maggots. Maggots used today clean wounds of the dead flesh, which prevents tissue infections. The therapy is effortless the doctors simply place the maggots into or around the wound and let the worms to their job. “The maggots are an incredible debriding machine,” says assistant professor Kovach, “and you’ll never see a cleaner wound than one that has maggots in it.” For that reason and being a painless method, we still practice it today. Moreover, a surgery used and possibly practice before maggots by the ancient Egyptians is Transsphenoidal surgery. This surgery entails removing tumors from certain areas of the brain by working through the nose. Raj Sindwani, an otolaryngologist with Cleveland Clinic states, “The ancient Egyptians found that the access point to the brain was the nose, they used to remove the brain through the nose before mummification. We now take advantage of this technique by removing brain tumors in that area.” Obviously, they did not do this surgery for the same reason we do today, perhaps because they would not have been able to sustain a patient’s life while doing so. One more surgery experienced by millions of mothers known as C-sections or Cesarean sections originated in 350 B.C. The origin of "cesarean" is