Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  And so proto-gin was born. The Dutch quickly worked these juniper drinks into their medical cabinets, where they were drunk for quite a few different purposes. Nursing mothers and wet nurses even drank gin to pass some of the healing properties of juniper on to the infants in their care. According to William Worth, a Dutch-English distiller:

  It is a general custom in Holland, when the Child is troubled with Oppressions of Wind, for the Mother whilst the Child is sucking, to drink of the Powers or Spirits of Juniper, by which the Child is Relieved.

  By the fifteenth century, most Dutch towns had their own distiller churning out this particular alcoholic invention, which they called genever. Although its initial origins were medical, gin quickly became favored throughout northern Europe for its taste and pleasing impacts on the mind.

  When genever made its way over to England, the working-class British, used to drinking watered-down beer, were quite literally floored by the high alcoholic content of the beverage. And so began the gin craze of the early eighteenth century, which would go on to ruin a staggering number of lives, and, in the process, transition gin firmly out of the medicine cabinet and into the gin shop.

  Today, we now know that overconsumption of gin—or really any alcohol—can also lead to “gin blossoms.” Yes, sometimes that means a late-night dose of sentimentality and “Hey Jealousy” on repeat as you wax nostalgic about the Clinton years, but also, more harmfully, gin blossoms on your face. These gin blossoms are the red lines and dots on the faces of heavy drinkers, which are dilated capillaries caused by drinking too much alcohol.

  Juniper berries en route to becoming something awesome.

  William the Conqueror’s exploding corpse

  William the Conqueror (1028–1087) wasn’t really feeling the “conqueror” part of his name as he advanced in years and his weight caught up with him. When William had grown so fat that he was having difficulty riding, he decided it was time to conquer his own body. With a diet. A hardcore diet consisting of nothing but alcohol. William lay in bed and basically went on a lengthy bender. And it worked. He soon lost enough weight to ride horses again, an irony, it turned out, because riding horses led to his untimely death. In 1087, William’s belly (still quite corpulent), smashed into the pommel of his saddle with so much force that it caused internal damage. William eventually died from the wound. In a horrifying historical side note to categorize under “how the mighty have fallen,” William’s already bloating body proved too large for his previously arranged sarcophagus. When his attendants attempted to force his body into the coffin, the body literally popped, filling the church with a terrible stench and a variety of disgusting bodily fluids. Needless to say, it was a brief funeral.

  Brandy

  Brandy is so universally regarded as superior to all other spirits from a medicinal point of view …

  —The Lancet, 1902

  Brandy and salt: the universal panacea. Don’t you want to look like her?

  Before the arrival of the Moors in southern Europe in the eighth century, Europe was strictly a place for wine and beer. The North Africans, in addition to reintroducing Europe to science and mathematics, brought with them the fine art of distillation. In a quest for new medicines, the Moors tried distilling almost anything they could get their hands on—including the local wines in Spain, where they had made their strongholds.

  When you distill wine down to its essence, you get a highly concentrated liquor, which today we call brandy. When the Spanish reclaimed the Iberian peninsula, the Moors left behind their distillation practices and a local taste for this new alcoholic beverage. Spanish monasteries kept up the tradition of distilling wine into brandy and began shipping it around the Christian world, including to the Vatican, where the papal doctor began prescribing it as a life-prolonging tonic. Soon brandy caught on as a health drink in its own right.

  For the next few hundred years, brandy enjoyed the greatest praise of all the alcoholic drinks in the medical world. It was considered a stimulant and was often the first item turned to in the case of fainting. Did Lady Arabella swoon and faint at your dashing entrance? Revive her with a shot of brandy.

  Physicians also utilized brandy when faced with hemorrhaging patients because alcohol was thought to promote clotting. Brandy was even sometimes injected directly into a patient’s arm, up his bum, or intravenously during a difficult pregnancy. It’s easy to imagine mothers in the agonies of childbirth in days before epidurals shouting “Just give me the damn brandy injection!”

  Brandy was also thought to work as a stimulant in cases of hypothermia, a reputation that made brandy a critical part of the supplies for early explorations of the Arctic. The problem is that although alcohol makes you feel warmer, it actually contributes to heat loss by widening your blood vessels at first. Later, it can tighten vessels and exacerbate frostbite. Nevertheless, even today, when this biological process is better understood, you’ll still find hunters in cold climates with a flask of alcohol in their bag of supplies. They are combining two terrible ideas in one horrendous package: Mixing guns and alcohol, and drinking to “stay warm.”

  Although the vasoactive effect of alcohol makes it a poor choice for hypothermic cases, gram for gram, alcohol supplies more calories than protein or carbohydrates. That fact, combined with its tendency to calm sick patients by intoxicating them, led many nineteenth-century doctors to include alcohol in their medical arsenal.

  Even as recently as the early 1900s, physicians were still prescribing brandy as a general health tonic. By the end of World War I, though, as pathology was better understood and new intravenous concoctions appeared, brandy fell from its honored place on the physician’s shelf.

  The Myth of Keg-Carrying St. Bernards

  A historical painting of a historical inaccuracy.

  St. Bernard dogs were kept at a monastery on the remote and dangerous St. Bernard’s Pass in the Alps, on hand to help with search-and-rescue missions for the many travelers stranded by snowstorms or avalanches. The dogs were extremely good at this job, able to sniff out humans and keep them warm until help could arrive. According to popular legend, the St. Bernards also carried alcohol in kegs around their necks to help warm and revive the hypothermic people they encountered. Athough it’s a pleasant story—and really, the sight of a warm dog and a keg of alcohol would rally the spirit if you were stranded in a snowstorm—it’s pure legend. No historical document survives recording this practice. Which is probably for the best, considering the impact of alcohol on hypothermic patients.

  Beer

  Despite being around for possibly longer than wine, beer has never quite enjoyed the same medical reputation. Even the doctors of yore seemed to recognize that the drawbacks outweighed the benefits. According to Italian physician Aldobrandino of Siena in 1256:

  But from whichever it is made, whether from oats, barley or wheat, it harms the head and the stomach, it causes bad breath and ruins the teeth, it fills the stomach with bad fumes, and as a result anyone who drinks it along with wine becomes drunk quickly; but it does have the property of facilitating urination and makes one’s flesh white and smooth.

  Aldobrandino does have a good point about beer facilitating urination. Just ask the guy walking around downtown on a Friday night with that urgent look in his eyes.

  Medicinal beer as a concept did crop up, somewhat bizarrely, during Prohibition, when a handful of special interest groups united around the common cause of making alcohol—really just any kind of alcohol—available for medical purchase. Having given up on anything harder than wine or beer, advocates began promoting the medicinal benefits of beer in the hopes that an exception to the Volstead Act (passed in 1919 to ban the consumption of alcohol) might be forthcoming from the government. Although medicinal beer would eventually earn a place in present-day hospitals, where doctors sometimes prescribe beer to patients to prevent withdrawal, Prohibition-era alcoholics weren’t so fortunate.

  “Since Prohibition went into effect I have been ap
proached by a number of physicians who appealed to me for beer on the ground that it was absolutely necessary for the welfare of their patients,” said Colonel Jacob Ruppert, a brewer who also happened to own the New York Yankees. Ruppert sadly informed the New York Times that he “was not in a position to help them.”

  Literally the best protest signs of all time.

  11

  Earth

  Of Death Row Deals, Terra Sigillata, Traveling Miners,Poisoning Dogs, and Dirt-Eaters

  In 1581, young Wendel Thumblardt’s days were numbered. Condemned in the town of Hohenlohe, Germany, for a string of robberies, Thumblardt was sentenced to the gallows. He had one more card up his sleeve, though. He’d heard of a powerful poison antidote called terra sigillata, or “sealed earth,” just then making its way around Germany. He proposed that instead of hanging him, they use his body like a lab rat.

  Thumblardt suggested they poison him with “the most deadly poison that might be devised.” And then a “perfit trial might bee had of the worthiness of this medicinable earth.” It was a clever wager: If he died, well, that’s where he was heading anyway. But if he lived, he would walk a free man.

  Wolfgang II, prince of the district, was sufficiently intrigued. Just several days before, a German-miner-turned-traveling-physician named Andreas Berthold had shown up in town, peddling little clay tablets known as terra sigillata. According to Berthold, these tablets were a panacea for just about anything that ailed you, but their special ability was to serve as an antidote to poison. Antidotes were a big deal at the time, when poisoning someone was as easy as a trip to your local apothecary, a quick dash of some powder in a wineglass, and Bob’s your uncle. Like any good ruler in the sixteenth century, when the Medicis were in power all over Europe, Wolfgang II took poison antidotes seriously.

  He agreed to the criminal’s request.

  Thumblardt was dragged up from some hellish dungeon and forced to ingest a dram and a half of “mercury sublimate, mingled with conserve of roses.” The prisoner truly got his wish of receiving “the most deadly poison that might be devised.” Mercury poisoning is a vicious, terrible way to die, complete with horrendous renal damage and the deeply painful corrosion of your mucus membranes and stomach lining … while you are still conscious. The amount they forced on the criminal, thoughtfully combined with a rose conserve to make it go down easier, was three times the dose needed to kill someone.

  Wolfgang II wasn’t taking any chances.

  After downing his poison, Thumblardt was immediately given some wine into which 4 grams of Berthold’s terra sigillata tablets had been dissolved.

  Lo and behold, Thumblardt survived to see another day, although not before “the poison did extremely torment and vexe him.” Figuring that surviving mercury poisoning was probably a sufficient theft deterrent, Wolfgang II made it his first order of business to release Thumblardt into the care of his parents. His second move was to buy a lifetime supply of terra sigillata from the traveling salesman. He even gave Berthold a letter bearing his stamp of approval so he could safely move around Germany advertising his tablets of earth.

  Ancient Earth, Sacred Earth

  Terra sigillata from Lemnos, overshadowed by a large cup.

  The practice of geophagy—that is, eating dirt—is considerably ancient, going back to at least 500 bce, when the inhabitants of Lemnos, a Grecian island in the Mediterranean, harvested red medicinal clay from a particular hill on a special day each year. With government officials supervising the process, the clay was washed, refined, rolled to a particular thickness, and then formed into little tablets. The island’s priestesses stepped in next, blessing and stamping the tablets with their official seal (hence the name terra sigillata, meaning “sealed earth”) before distributing them to the Lemnos equivalent of pharmacies, where the clay was sold as a medicinal aid.

  For what? you might ask. Clay has been used as an antidote since antiquity, as it slows down absorbtion of drugs within the digestive tract. It’s even helpful for healing wounds. The quackery part comes from the religious significance awarded the little clay tablets, the special geographic focus claimed to enhance their power, and the cure-all capabilites assigned to them. Clay can be effective in certain medical situations, even if it’s not blessed and stamped by a priestess or dug from the hills of Lemnos.

  Various seals for terra sigillatas around Europe. Collect them all!

  Hippocrates himself mentions the healing properties of ingesting clay tablets, in his case referencing clay from the island of Samos. He was followed by Dioscorides, who recommended clay as an antidote, an astringent, and an antidiarrheal, and Galen, who traveled to Lemnos to watch the production of terra sigillata in person. He was impressed. So impressed that he took back twenty thousand tablets to Rome in 167 ce.

  Terra sigillata distribution waned with the fall of the Classical world, not appearing again until it made its way back into Europe via the invading forces of the Ottoman Turks, who were convinced that a special clay from Armenia was a cure for the plague. Although ingesting Armenian clay would have been technically ineffective against the bacterial onslaught of the bubonic plague, the placebo effect of ingesting something sacred or special may indeed have contributed to the occasional recovery.

  One area the Turks occupied? The land around Striga (present-day Strzegom, Poland), where Andreas Berthold lived and worked as a miner.

  Quick, you’ve just been poisoned and have three choices for your terra sigillata antidote: silver, gold, or red.

  Building an Empire out of Clay

  Berthold had shown up in several towns in Germany, advertising his terra sigillata to the local leaders. In his wake, he left a string of dead dogs, who were the lab animal of choice when the townsfolk wanted to see if the mysterious clay actually worked as a poison antidote. The dogs that were given the tablets survived their poisonings; the other dogs, well, not so much.

  In the Renaissance, terra sigillata was used across Europe, not only as an antidote to poison, but also for the treatment of dysentery, ulceration, hemorrhages, gonorrhea, fever, kidney complaints, and eye infections. Most of these treatments would have been ineffective from a biological standpoint and were likely by-products of enthusiasm for these little clay tablets that sometimes worked as an antidote. If it’s powerful enough to rescue someone poisoned by mercury sublimate, well, why not see if it works with gonorrhea as well?

  After moving to the big leagues with his human trial in Hohenlohe, Berthold’s fame and fortune grew. He became unstoppable as a one-man dirt-selling show in the late sixteenth century. Of course, an obvious problem with going into the clay-selling business is that it’s not exactly a rare mineral. The stuff is pretty easy to find. So it was important for Berthold—and those who followed in his wake—to assign some special or, better yet, magical quality to their clay stores. Berthold claimed the special medicinal properties of his terra sigillata were owed to their geographic source in the hills around Striga.

  Ceramic vase for terra sigillata storage.

  In other words, this wasn’t just any old dirt. You certainly weren’t going to get the extraordinary medical benefits by digging in your neighbor’s garden. No, you needed terra sigillata, the real stuff, specially stamped with a seal, drawn from the hills around Striga. Berthold’s intelligent marketing plan was initially a success, and within a few years, Strigan terra sigillata was for sale at apothecary shops from Nuremberg to London.

  The Dirt-Eaters of the South

  In 1984, the New York Times published an article on the declining trend of geophagy. If you think people would turn to eating a handful of soil in only the most dire circumstances, then you haven’t met Mrs. Glass. “It just always tasted so good to me,” said Mrs. Glass, a resident of rural Mississippi, in her interview with the Times. “When it’s good and dug from the right place, dirt has a fine sour taste.”

  For many years, geophagy was part of the culinary tradition of the rural South, where the practice had been importe
d with the slave trade from West Africa. Dirt eating was relatively widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and almost exclusively engaged in by poor women who grew accustomed, even preferential, to the taste.

  The same Mrs. Glass, who was at the time of her interview in the process of giving up the practice, wistfully added, “There are times when I really miss it. I wish I had some dirt right now.”

  The dirt of choice for Southerners was clay, which does in fact have some medicinal qualities to it; depending on the source, it can have high levels of calcium, copper, magnesium, iron, and zinc, all of which are important for human health, and, in the case of pregnant women—who occasionally engaged in geophagy across cultural groups—crucial for it. The soils of West Africa and the American South happen to be rich in these minerals, which might explain the development and continuation of the practice.

  The placebo effect was boosted by aesthetics: From Lemnos to Striga, the pieces of terra sigillata were also beautiful objects, so much so that part of their efficacy could be attributed to the patient’s belief in a magical, almost talismanic quality of the little clay tablets.

  There was even a special magic that resulted from just being near terra sigillata. Some physicians, hovering on the blurry renaissance line between science and magic, simply recommended that their patient wear a terra sigillata tablet around the neck to enjoy its curative properties.

  It couldn’t last forever, though, and soon many towns were getting in on the action, harvesting clay themselves, putting their own special stamp on it, and proclaiming their tablets held their own particular medicinal virtues. Berthold’s empire began to crumble.

  Poisoning gradually became less common (yay, humans!) and advances in medicine in the early modern era brought more effective treatments for dysentery, ulceration, hemorrhages, gonorrhea, fever, kidney complaints, and eye infections. And so terra sigillata gradually fell out of use, with the handful of tablets that survived getting picked up by wealthy antiquarians on Grand Tours of Europe in the nineteenth century and eventually making their way into curiosity cabinets and museums.