Stick Out Your ToungeSnakes , you just ca n’t commit " ˜em . First they go around get us humans kicked out of paradise , then they ( or , rather , their crude ) become synonymous with quacks and letters patent medicine . Snake fat , you see , was once believed to have healing powers and no Snake River fat solvent was more curative than " Stanley ’s Snake Oil,“ the brainchild of cowboy Clark " The Rattlesnake King" Stanley . The King made a name for himself hawking his wares at the 1893 Chicago World ’s Fair , where he dressed in splashy western togs and convinced grand of customers that his oil color could heal everything from mosquito bites to atrophic arthritis . Despite the snake oil ’s miraculous reputation , Stanley was careful to point out that it was for external use only . Good thing . When the U.S. regime finally function some trial on the hooey in 1917 , they found it contain a few ingredients you would n’t need down the hatching , include : mineral oil , used to ( roughly ) remedy constipation ; camphor petroleum , which is used primarily as embalming fluid ; and turps , a key ingredient in rouge stripper and Vap - o - rub . As for the assure oil colour of rattler , that snake in the grass Stanley had used leisurely - to - acquire beef fat instead . Turn Your Head and CoughHairballs are n’t so pretty when they turn up on the rug , but during the Renaissance these candidly gross GI phenomena were prized for their powers of healing and shelter . While we ’re familiar with the pixilated , stringy hairballs kitty folio behind , the pharmecuetical version , called bezoars , were more like pearls and were make in the stomachs of goats or other cud - masticate animals . People believed these vitreous masses of compressed tomentum and food could sop up poisonous substance or even madness out of the body . member of the Medici family , who controlled much of Europe at the time , carried them around obsessively , though not without reason , as poison members of the Medici family was something of a continental sport . The bezoar lives on in today ’s medical lit , but mostly in the psychopathology section . Doctors on occasion have to remove them from the stomach of multitude who obsessionally chew their whisker .
phratry medicine in Ireland relied heavily on the belief that you could as if by magic transfer illness from a someone to an animal ( ordinarily a slovenly person or a Equus asinus ) . These " transference cures" were especially popular for heal epidemic parotitis and whooping cough . When Irish immigrants go under in America , they add their belief in transfer with them . In Appalachia , for representative , people once believed that the surest therapeutic for a kink in the cervix was to rub your neck opening on a tree diagram a hog had just rubbed against .
It ’s All In Your HeadFolk medicine was n’t just about inventing cures ; sometimes practitioners die that additional mile and invented a whole disease . Take " white liver,“ a disease that purportedly caused white spots to appear on aforementioned organ , but who ’s external symptom affected harmonium of a unlike sort . sick person of the white liver , which were primarily women , were said to have insatiate sex drive . In the nineteenth century American South , women who had last more than one husband were sometimes love as " white livered widders,“ the idea being that they had , in effect , please their husbands into and other grave . Although Americans have pretty much replaced clean liver with nymphomania , the terminus is still popular in Jamaica . unluckily ( or fortunately ) for victim of white liver , there is no known therapeutic .
Feel better about your HMO yet ? There ’s more info on questionable aesculapian practises where this come from . Check out mental_floss book 3 , subject 5 .
