For those who decided to try any of the following cures, the treatment was worse than the affliction.
Dead Mouse Paste
Before any effective pain medication was developed, people would try just about anything to relieve pain. The Egyptians had one of the grossest, vomit-inducing treatments for a toothache that I’ve ever heard of.
First, you find a dead mouse and crush it then blend it with herbs and some other ingredients until it forms a paste. Why would one blend herbs and other ingredients with a crushed mouse? Maybe so it wouldn’t smell as bad and leave such a horrid taste in your mouth?
Next, you apply this to the aching tooth and surrounding gums. Even if this took away the pain, I think I would rather deal with the toothache. This probably isn’t much of a surprise, but it didn’t do much to relieve the pain. It did often cause infections though.
Bonus: In Elizabethan England, half of a dead mouse was used to treat warts. Yes, I said half. You first had to cut the dead mouse in half and then lay it on the offending wart. I’m not sure how you would react to that, but I would be more repulsed by half of a dead mouse than a wart.
Sitting in a Rotting Whale Carcass
Towards the end of the 19th century, a new cure for rheumatoid arthritis was found in Australia. No, it wasn’t discovered by anyone in the medical profession. This “cure” was discovered by a gentleman, who was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis himself. For some unknown reason while walking along a beach, he decided to jump inside a rotting whale carcass. Maybe he was drunk or stoned?
His friends, who couldn’t stand the smell, just decided to leave him there. When the gentleman emerged approximately thirty hours later, he declared that his rheumatoid arthritis had completely disappeared.
All of your joints must stay submerged in the rotting carcass, so I wonder, just what would one do while sitting in there? Watch the bugs around you feasting on the carcass? Breathe in the stench surrounding you?
Tapeworm Diet
How badly do you want to lose weight? Would you swallow tapeworm eggs or tapeworms to do so?
The thought behind this is simple. A tapeworm will eat what you eat. It will eat so much that you probably won’t be able to eat enough. So what’s wrong with using tapeworms?
One, you can’t control where the tapeworm will attach itself. Instead of your digestive tract, it could attach itself to other organs anywhere in the body, causing unpleasant symptoms like feelings of weakness, fever, nausea, diarrhea, or pain in the abdomen. Even worse, you could end up being allergic to tapeworms.
This nightmare-inducing weight loss plan was practiced during the Victorian era. I’m sure you can find people who claim to sell pills with tapeworm eggs in them, but this dangerous and sometimes lethal practice has been outlawed by the Food & Drug Administration. Taking them can even be deadly.
https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20190329/teen-dies-after-tapeworm-eggs-invade-brain
Writing Prompts
Dead mouse paste – For the Egyptians to think that this was the cure for a toothache, it had to work for at least one person. Write a scene in which this person is running around his hometown proclaiming the healing powers of mouse paste.
Sitting in a rotting whale carcass – Write about the man who proclaimed that sitting inside a rotting whale carcass cured his rheumatoid arthritis. Why did he decide to jump inside the carcass? How did he stand the stench? What did he think while he was in there? Why didn’t it make him sick? What was the reaction of others when he came out of the dead whale? What is the whale carcass had exploded while he was inside it?
Tapeworm diet – Pretend that swallowing tapeworm eggs or tapeworms doesn’t have any ill effects on a person physically. All kinds of people do this to stay thin. But then one day, a person who has swallowed tapeworm eggs starts to go crazy. What happens?
