Mercury, opium and tobacco! But that’s just a glimpse of the possibilities. In 1863, the Canada Lancet gave a list of recipes for other “medicinal” cigarettes. In addition to the mercury cigarette, they recommended
Arsenical Cigarettes.
Yup, cigarettes containing arsenic, and made from blotting paper steeped in arsenous acid. The latter chemical is highly toxic and carcinogenic, and has been used to kill weeds, rats and mice. All things considered, smoking it is a Bad Idea.
Nitre Cigarettes. Dip the paper in a saturated solution of the nitrate of potash before rolling.
Nitrate of potash, also known as saltpeter, is potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder. Smoke with all due caution.
Balsamic Cigarettes are made by giving the dried nitre cigarettes a coating of tincture of benzoin.
Tincture of benzoin is still sometimes inhaled in steam today, to ease the symptoms of bronchitis, but . . . ! The article concludes with a list of some of the miraculous cures attributed to medicated cigarettes:
Aphonia.—A patient who could not speak above a whisper for over a year, probably due to a thickened condition of the chordae vocales, as she had no pain or constitutional symptoms, used the mercurial cigarettes for a month, and perfectly recovered.
Offensive discharges from the nostrils, with a sense of uneasiness in the frontal sinuses, was quite cured in about a month with the mercurial cigarettes. The patient held his nose after taking a mouthful of the smoke, and then forced it into his nostrils in the manner practised by accomplished smokers.
Thus coating the delicate mucous membranes with fresh mercury vapor.
Phthisis.—Trousseau long ago recommended a puff or two of an arsenical cigarette twice or three times a day in phthisis.
Smoking while suffering from phthisis (tuberculosis) is perhaps the very worst thing you could do. Especially if arsenic’s involved.
When the attention of the profession has been duly aroused to this subject, there will doubtless be found many other affections in which medicated cigarettes may be advantageously employed.
No doubt. How about lung cancer?
THE TAPEWORM TRAP
In September 1856, an American journal, The Medical and Surgical Reporter, published a chatty “letter from New York.” Their correspondent was a physician at one of the city’s hospitals who called himself J. Gotham, Jr., MD. This was almost certainly a pseudonym: Although Gotham is best known as the fictional New York City of Batman and the Joker, the nickname first appeared in Washington Irving’s periodical Salmagundi in 1807. Today, Gotham has noirish overtones, but for the nineteenth-century reader, the associations of the name were essentially farcical. Irving named his satirical version of New York after an English village whose residents had a reputation for idiotic behavior—a perfect analogy, he felt, for the incompetence of the municipal bigwigs who ran the city.
Dr. Gotham’s dispatch from the cutting edge of New York medical science is certainly not short of absurdity:
As it is my desire to keep you advised of all the improvements in medical and surgical practice which this prolific age is ushering into being, it is my happy privilege now to bring to your notice one of the most ingenious, if not successful—the most far reaching, and deep searching, if not most likely to prove profitable, invention, ever accredited to Yankee wit and skill. It is one before which the lustre of the genius which produced the new operation for vaginal fistula must wax dim, and the discoverers of catheterism of the lungs must “pale their intellectual fires.”
The “new operation for vaginal fistula” was devised by James Marion Sims in the 1840s, a surgical cure for an uncomfortable and embarrassing condition that often left women incontinent after childbirth.* “Catheterism of the lungs” was pioneered by the Vermont-born specialist Horace Green. It was a contentious treatment for tuberculosis that involved injecting silver nitrate directly into the lungs, using a rubber catheter passed down the patient’s throat. Both these procedures were perceived as major advances, and emblematic of a new spirit of surgical adventure. As you’ve probably worked out, Dr. Gotham is drawing such comparisons ironically.
The government of the United States has immortalised its history by the issue of letters patent, securing to the inventor the exclusive right for fourteen years, of using a “Trap for Tapeworm”, a description and engraving of which are given in vol. 1 for 1854 of the Patent Office Reports.
The original patent for the tapeworm trap was filed by Alpheus Myers, a doctor from Logansport, Indiana. Dr. Myers was an exponent of Eclectic Medicine, a distinctly American school that rejected the chemical remedies and invasive procedures of conventional medicine. Instead of the poisonous laxatives and bloodletting favored by orthodox physicians, its adherents preferred plant remedies and gentle physical therapy. His invention was therefore an attempt to dispense with the toxic anthelmintic (anti-worm) agents then in use, such as powdered tin, calomel and even petroleum. Strangely, he patented not just the device but the operation for which it was designed—thus ensuring that he would be the only person in the country allowed to use it. This is not a particularly clever thing to do if your aim is to sell your invention to lots of other people.
Another article from The Medical and Surgical Reporter describes the use of this unusual contraption:
The tapeworm trap is a very small hollow tube of gold so arranged as to contain a small piece of cheese for a bait. The patient, after a fast of four or five days, is ordered to swallow the trap, with a string attached. It is claimed by the inventor that after a long-continued fast, the worm comes up into the stomach, and will then greedily seize the cheese, be caught in the trap, and can be easily pulled out.
This sounds most unlikely, not least because tapeworms live in the intestines and are averse to jaunts into the stomach, where the strongly acidic conditions would prove rapidly fatal. The inventor, Alpheus Myers, himself explains:
The cord is fastened to some conspicuous place about the patient, who is left to his ease from six to twelve hours, and during this time the worm will have seized the bait and have been caught by the head or neck. The capture of the worm will either be felt by the patient or ascertained by the motion which will be visible in the cord. The patient should rest for a few hours after the capture, and then by a gentle pulling at the cord the trap and worm will, with ease and perfect safety, be withdrawn.
The journal’s correspondent comments, with not a little sarcasm:
Imagine to yourself the satisfaction with which a man could thus sit down and fish in his own room, without even the accompanying tub of water; the patience and complacency with which, after waiting from six to twelve hours for a bite, he would then play his prisoner some hours more before landing him! Does not Mr Alpheus Myers have good reason to believe that the shade of Izaak Walton looks down upon him in anger for this innovation upon the piscatorial art?
Fishing for worms in one’s own stomach does sound like a rather unappetizing way of spending an afternoon. In its coverage of the development, Scientific American claimed that “Dr. Myers, not long since, removed one fifty feet in length from a patient, who, since then, has had a new lease of life.” A likely story.
Back to Dr. Gotham. His letter continues with a savage attack on the US patent office for even considering this nonsense:
My object in drawing the attention of your readers to it, is simply to expose the shameful ignorance, not of Alpheus Myers, but of the officers of our government, who would take money from a man for so gross an absurdity as this. There are physicians connected with the Patent Office, men whose names stand well before the country, and how they or the commissioner, could have allowed the seal of the office to be affixed to such a document for such a monstrously ridiculous contrivance, surpasses all comprehension.
He had a point. Not until 1965, when the husband-and-wife inventors George and Charlotte Blonsky succeeded in patenting their “Apparatus for facilitat
ing the birth of a child by centrifugal force,”* would the US Patent Office rise to quite the same ludicrous heights.
THE PORT-WINE ENEMA
Alcoholic drinks were an important part of the physician’s armory until surprisingly recently. In the early years of the twentieth century, brandy (or whiskey, in the US) was still being administered to patients as a stimulant after they had undergone major surgery. Every tipple you can think of—from weak ale to strong spirits—has been prescribed at one time or another.
But doctors didn’t get their patients just to drink booze; indeed, they were remarkably imaginative in the strange things they did with it—injecting it into the abdominal cavity, for instance, or getting patients to inhale it. But this case, published in The British Medical Journal in 1858, trumps even those examples for sheer wrongheadedness.
No, you didn’t misread the headline: This article seriously suggests a port-wine enema as an alternative to a blood transfusion. The author is Dr. Llewellyn Williams from St. Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex:
On September 22nd 1856 I was called into the country, a distance of four miles, to attend Mrs C., aged 42, then about to be confined of her tenth child. All her previous accouchements had been favourable. When about six months advanced in pregnancy, she received a violent shock by the sudden death of her youngest child, since which time her general health had become much impaired. She had a peculiar pasty anaemic appearance, and complained much of general weakness.
Shortly after the doctor’s arrival, a “fine female child” was born without much difficulty. But then:
My patient exclaimed, “I am flooding away,” and fainted. I immediately had recourse to such restoratives as were at hand, and presently she began to revive.
The poor woman’s desperate shout was a literal description of her plight: She was bleeding heavily, at such a rate that she would soon be dead unless the hemorrhage could be arrested. Any improvement in her condition was short-lived, and Dr. Llewellyn Williams became seriously concerned.
My efforts still being foiled, and the haemorrhage continuing, the powers of life manifesting evident symptoms of flagging, I introduced my left hand into the uterus, after the manner recommended by Gooch,* endeavouring to compress the bleeding vessels with the knuckles of this hand, whilst with the other I pressed upon the uterine tumour from without. This combination of external and internal pressure was equally as unavailing as any of the other plans already tried. At last, by compressing the abdominal aorta, as recommended by Baudelocque the younger,* I was enabled effectually to restrain any further haemorrhage.
The abdominal aorta—the largest blood vessel in the lower half of the body—is only a few inches from the spinal column, so compressing it by hand is a procedure as difficult as it is drastic.
The condition of my patient had now become sufficiently alarming, she having been for upwards of half an hour quite pulseless at the wrist, the extremities cold, continual jactitation being present, the sphincters relaxed, and the whole surface bedewed with cold clammy perspiration.
Jactitation is pompous medic-speak for “tossing and turning.” It was probably archaic even in the 1850s.
It now became a question what remedy could be had recourse to, which should rescue the patient from this alarming state, it being utterly impossible to administer any stimulant by the mouth. My distance from home, together with considerable objections to the operation itself, which it is not here needful to dwell upon, made me abandon the idea of transfusion of blood.
The first successful human blood transfusion was conducted by James Blundell in 1818, also for postpartum hemorrhage. But it was hideously risky: Blood types were not discovered until 1901, so it was not possible to match donor to recipient, with often catastrophic results. But Dr. Llewellyn Williams had another idea. A really rather strange one.
As a means which I believe will prove equally as powerful as transfusion in arresting the vital spirit, I had recourse to enemata of port wine, believing that this remedy possesses a threefold advantage. The stimulating and life-sustaining effects of the wine are made manifest in the system generally; the application of cold to the rectum excites the reflex action of the nerves supplying the uterus; and the astringent property of port wine may act beneficially by causing the open extremities of the vessels themselves to contract.
Applying cold liquid to arrest bleeding was at least a rational thing to do: Crushed ice was often piled on top of the abdomen after childbirth if hemorrhage was difficult to arrest. But in other respects, the use of port in these circumstances has little to recommend it.
I commenced by administering about four ounces of port wine, together with twenty drops of tincture of opium. It was interesting to note the rapidity with which the stimulating effects of the wine became manifest on the system.
After a brief improvement, the woman’s pulse began to flag, so the doctor administered a second enema.
A more marked improvement was now manifest in the patient. She regained her consciousness; the pulse continued feebly perceptible at the wrist. In half an hour I had again recourse to the enema, with the most gratifying result; and, after ten hours’ most anxious watching, I had the happiness of leaving my patient out of danger.
Whether Dr. Llewellyn Williams was in any way responsible for her improvement remains a moot point.
The quantity of wine consumed was rather more than an ordinary bottle.
Not the most pleasurable way of consuming a bottle of port, by any means.
There’s a minor postscript to this unexpectedly happy ending: Six months after his article appeared in print, the British Medical Journal announced that Dr. Llewellyn Williams’s wife had given birth to a son. Whether she was given rectal doses of port, brandy or any other stimulating alcoholic beverage is not recorded. For her sake, let’s hope the good doctor left the delivery of his own child to one of his colleagues.
THE SNAKE-DUNG SALESMAN
In 1862, an Edinburgh-trained physician, Dr. John Hastings, published a slim volume about the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases of the lung. It advocates the use of substances that much of the profession would regard as unorthodox, as he acknowledges in his preface:
It has been suggested that the peculiar character of these agents may possibly prove a bar to their employment for medicinal purposes.
Dr. Hastings then anticipates another likely objection—that the “medicine” he recommends is difficult to get hold of. Fear not: He can recommend some suppliers.
It may be useful to add that these new agents may chiefly be procured from the Zoological Gardens of London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Paris, and other large towns. They may also be obtained from the dealers in reptiles, two of whom—Jamrach and Rice*—reside in Ratcliffe-highway, whilst two or three others are to be found in Liverpool.
One might reasonably ask what sort of medicine can be purchased only at a zoo or pet shop. Dr. Hastings explains that he spent several years trying to find novel medicinal substances in nature, without success. Deciding that pharmacies were already “crowded with medicines derived from the vegetable and mineral world,” he resolved to investigate possible miracle cures in the animal kingdom.
It would be foreign to my purpose to detail here the various animals I put in requisition in the course of this investigation, or the animal products I examined during a prolonged inquiry. It is enough to state that I found in the excreta of reptiles agents of great medicinal value in numerous diseases where much help was needed.
Yes, Dr. Hastings’s miracle cure was reptile excrement. His book is entitled
Which reptiles, you may be asking?
My earliest trials were made with the excreta of the boa constrictor, which I employed in the first instance dissolved simply in water. A gallon of water will not dissolve two grains, and yet, strange as the statement may appear, half a teaspoonful of this solution rubbed over the chest of a consumptive patient wi
ll give instantaneous relief to his breathing.
Not just the boa constrictor either. Dr. Hastings provides a list of the species whose droppings he has investigated: nine types of snake (including African cobras, Australian vipers and Indian river snakes), five varieties of lizard and two tortoises. After his eureka moment, the intrepid physician was eager to introduce the new medicinal agents into clinical practice, and so he started to prescribe reptile excrement for his patients. Since his specialty was tuberculosis, most of the people who came to see Dr. Hastings would have been scared and desperate. In the 1860s, there was no cure for TB; although it was not universally fatal, around half of those who contracted the disease would die, most of them within two years.
Dr. Hastings includes a number of case reports. The first concerns “Mr. P.,” a twenty-eight-year-old musician who consulted him about a troublesome cough. Unexplained weight loss had eventually prompted the diagnosis of tuberculosis:
I prescribed the 200th part of a grain of the excreta of the monitor niloticus (warning lizard of the Nile) in a tablespoonful of water, to be taken three times a day, and directed an external application of the same solution to the diseased side. He was much better at the end of a week, and after a further week’s treatment I lost sight of him in consequence of his believing himself cured.
Another was “the Reverend Q.C.,” who sought treatment after he started to cough up blood, the classic presentation of tuberculosis. He was treated with two different types of lizard poo:
I applied to the walls of the left chest a lotion composed of the excreta of the boa constrictor of the strength of the ninety-sixth part of a grain to half an ounce of water. Under this treatment his amendment made rapid progress, until the month of May, when I prescribed for him a solution of the excreta of the monitor niloticus (warning lizard of the Nile) of the strength of the 200th part of a grain in two teaspoonfuls of water three times a day, and directed him to use the same mixture externally.
The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine Page 11
