15 Vintage Medical Practices that Don’t Exist Anymore
Neill Lynskey
Published
12 hours ago
in
History
Medical technology has come a long way.
Until recently, many medical procedures and devices resembled evil experiments more than life-saving cures. Children who weren’t even sick were routinely given radiation therapy, drilling holes into people's heads was common practice, and electromagnetic corsets were placed on women in hopes of curing their hysteria.
Here are some things we’re glad doctors no longer put their patients through.
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1. Diathermy Machines
Early physiotherapy devices that zapped deep tissues with high-frequency radio waves to “promote healing” -
2. Violet Rays
Glass electrodes attached to a Tesla coil, these buzzing wands claimed to treat everything from baldness to hemorrhoids -
3. Artificial leeches
Devices made to mimic the function of leeches for bloodletting -
4. Trepanning
Trepanning, essentially drilling a hole in someone’s head, was used since medieval to “relieve pressure” -
5. Plombage therapy
In the 1930s, surgeons would collapse a lung and fill the chest cavity with Lucite balls, paraffin wax, or even oil to let the lung “rest.” -
6. Radioactive Heating Pads
Used in the 1920s for muscle aches -
7. Iron lungs
A life-saving full-body ventilator used for polio patients -
8. Cigarettes for asthma
Doctors routinely prescribed patients cigarettes in the early 20th century -
9. Magnetic corsets
In the 1920s, womens undergarments embedded with magnets were used to relieve menstrual pain -
10. Colonic Irrigators
Early home enema kits marketed as “internal bathing systems.” Claimed to cure everything from fatigue to insanity -
11. Prefrontal Lobotomy
A popular treatment in the 1950s for mental illness involving severing connections in the brain's frontal lobe -
12. Radium Water Jars
"Revigator" water crocks were lined with radium-laced ore to infuse drinking water with radioactive health benefits. -
13. Sun-ray treatment
For people lacking in vitamin D -
14. Leeching
Leeches were used from ancient times all the way until the early 20th century, as it was believed bloodletting was a cure for many ailments -
15. Radiation therapy for children
Many childhood issues in the 1930s were ascribed to internal organs being “enlarged”, so doctors tried to shrink them with radiation
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Diathermy Machines
Early physiotherapy devices that zapped deep tissues with high-frequency radio waves to “promote healing”
Early physiotherapy devices that zapped deep tissues with high-frequency radio waves to “promote healing”
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