Halloween Special: Our top five strange and scary medical treatments in history

There are many historic medicines, medical treatments and medical practices that, while thankfully aren't used today, were once used regularly to treat all kinds of injuries and conditions. 

Here, as a Halloween special, we list our top five of some of the scariest and most strange medical treatments and medicines in history.

Mental health is, thankfully, subject to better treatments today than it ever has been before. Many years ago however, the ways mental health was ‘cured' included some rather strange, frankly unnerving procedures, including a medical practice called lobotomy.

Lobotomy was a medical treatment designed to sever the nerve pathways located in the brain lobes which were thought to process emotion. The method for doing this was horrific, as it included drilling holes into a person's skull and hammering through the eye socket. 

This procedure was used many times and, while there was never really any medical evidence to support the alleged benefits of it, it took many years for Lobotomies to be stopped.

The idea of drilling, cutting or scraping holes into a skull as a medical treatment likely makes you shudder in horror. A far scarier prospect than any Halloween trick, that's for sure! 

Trepanation, a medical treatment for relieving severe cranial pressure, involved exactly that however.

This historic medical practice, also known as stone age brain surgery, is one of the earliest medical treatments, with several instances of it evidenced in medical history. In fact, Trepanation was used throughout the stone age, and continued to be used during the Renaissance. 

This historical medicine treatment was carried out mainly on males but there is evidence it was carried out on females and children. Remarkably, people have been known to survive the treatment as there is evidence of skulls healing after this medical treatment.

Whilst waterboarding is prohibited nowadays as it is considered a form of torture, in bygone days it was used as a medical treatment for mental health disorders, with many believing that the shock caused by the treatment could trigger a positive response in the brain. 

Patients were almost drowned during the procedure, and when they regained consciousness they were thought to be cured of their mental health disorder. 

Waterboarding was administered in several forms such as:

• Holding a patient underwater
• Dunking them
• Showering them

The polio vaccine was not developed until the 1950s and prior to this many unfortunately died as a result of the disease.  

Before the vaccine existed, medical practice was needed to fight the disease, and the medical treatment given was known as “the iron lung”. 

This procedure involved a large metal cabinet in which a person suffering from polio had to lie in, often for weeks. The ‘iron lung' allowed those unable to breathe due to paralysed chest muscles - a common symptom of polio - to breathe.

Bloodletting and leeching is one of the oldest medical practices and was used as far back as 3000 years ago, having been a popular treatment of choice for the ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks 

Bloodletting was a medical practice used to treat diseases such as smallpox and the plague, and was even believed to be useful to treat those who suffer with epilepsy. 

It was still widely used in the 19th century, however once doctors realised that depleting blood supplies increases the risk of cardiac arrest, severe blood loss, low blood pressure, anaemia and infections, it was stopped. 

The belief that bloodletting was perhaps a form of evil helped make the decision to stop using it as a medical treatment too!

Have you ever wondered what historic medicine is used today? Whilst thankfully trepanning is not used in modern medicine, similar surgical procedures do exist today. For example, craniotomies are a medical treatment for the buildup of blood between the skull, the brain and membranes in between. 

Medical treatments have come far thanks to developments in medical science, skill and training.. There are a variety of medical developments which have been thought to change the world such as:

• Vaccination against viral infections, including the polio vaccine
• Anaesthetics to ease and prevent pain
• Medicine such as antibiotics to treat communicable diseases
• Medical treatments for the heart such as the ability to operate and repair

^{Last updated 21.10.22}