15 Of The Most Outrageous Medical Treatments In History

Before we had better methods of disciplining children, soothing syrups were developed to deal with disobedient kids. They essentially were used to sedate or calm children, and they were full of all the right narcotics to get the job done. Supposedly, an ounce of one of these syrups contained 65 mg of pure morphine.

Moldy bread was used in many ancient cultures — in Greece, China, Egypt, and Serbia, among other countries — to heal open wounds and prevent infection. While this sounds unsanitary, we now know that some fungi do kill bacteria. I guess they weren’t so far off.

Invented by Angelo Mariani, Vin Mariani was basically a red wine treated with coca leaves. It was meant to be a healing tonic, but as most know, the coca leaves contained cocaine. Doctors approved the drink for any man, woman, and child.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you — arsenic, the poison, was thought to have medicinal applications as recently as the 1950s. Most of the time, it was an ingredient in more complex concoctions, most notably to treat malaria, syphilis, arthritis, and diabetes.