Dreadful Diseases And Terrible Treatments

Human health's darkest hours in gruesome detail. Dreadful Diseases and Terrible Treatments covers everything from common complaints to epidemics. Squirming parasites, bursting pustules, rotting limbs, and cascading diarrhea: it's all depicted here in vivid detail. Sometimes the remedy proved as unbearable as the sickness itself. Whether performing dire dentistry or ice-pick lobotomies, bloodletting or blistering, the medical practitioners of history were ever inventive, if not effective. Disease played a role in shaping human history, too: read how measles and smallpox hastened the decline of the native peoples of the Americas, and how typhus helped to defeat Napoleon. Extraordinary anecdotes abound, such as the cautionary tale of Typhoid Mary and how a cow called Blossom saved the day. Packed with startling medical illustrations, this morbidly fascinating study of all that ails is bound to grip you from page one and leave you reaching for the disinfectant.

Dreadful Diseases and Terrible Treatments charts humankind's battle against illness from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Starting with common complaints, it describes some of the most ill-advised cures in the annals of medical history: from lancets and leeches to bed rest and fecal remedies.

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers examines the discourse of seventeenth-century English physicians to demonstrate that physicians utilized cultural attitudes and beliefs to create medical theory. They meshed moralism with medicine to self-fashion an image of themselves as knowledgeable health experts whose education assured good judgment and sage advice, and whose interest in the health of their patients surpassed the peddling of a single nostrum to everyone. The combination of morality with medicine gave them the support of the influential godly in society because physicians’ theories about disease and its prevention supported contemporary concerns that sinfulness was rampant. Particularly disturbing to the godly were sins deemed most threatening to the social order: lasciviousness, ungodliness, and unruliness, all of which were most clearly and threateningly manifested in the urban poor. Physicians’ medical theories and suggestions for curbing some of the most feared and destructive diseases in the seventeenth century, most notably plague and syphilis, focused on reforming or incarcerating the sick and sinful poor. Doing so helped propel physicians to an elevated position in the hierarchy of healers competing for patients in seventeenth-century England.

Weirdness abounds in this unprecedented compilation of peculiar facts, including forms of divination, bizarre tortures, invasive medical tests, celebrity UFO sightings, crucified saviors other than Jesus, banned books, elements of a near death experience, curious tourist attractions, ridiculous sex laws, and much more. Dr. Bizarro’s Eclectic Collection of Strange and Obscure Facts is a fascinating and irresistible compendium of bizarre info and trivia that will engage and surprise every reader.

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