Quackery
Page 17
The problem with using alcohol or other substances like it is that you need a lot—as in poisonous quantities—to prevent someone from waking during surgery. So other methods were developed. Stories are told of men being whacked in the head for a concussion-induced sleep before castration in ancient China. Obviously, we had a ways to go.
It took a lot of trial, error, and more than a few doped pets to reach our modern era of painless medical procedures. Several chapters in the annals of anesthesia were written by some hard-partying, borderline sociopathic characters. So the next time you blissfully awaken from a surgery, remember to thank the child-stranglers, sponge-huffers, and ether frolickers of the past. Let us introduce you to a few of them.
Carbon Dioxide Gonna Knock You Out
Henry Hill Hickman was a puppy killer. One of the fathers of modern anesthesia, the British physician tested his theories of “suspended animation” on animals in the early nineteenth century. He used carbonic acid gas (what is now known as carbon dioxide) as an inhalant thusly:
I took a puppy a month old … and placed a glass cover so as to prevent the access of atmospheric air; in ten minutes, he showed great marks of uneasiness, in 12 respiration became difficult, and in 17 minutes ceased altogether, at 18 minutes I took off one of the Ears … and the animal did not appear to be the least sensible of pain.
Let us pause for a moment to weep for the test subject.
Oh, for crying out loud, that poor puppy!
So yes, Hickman was suffocating puppies—sometimes to death. But he wasn’t the first to use asphyxiation as anesthesia: Some claim that the Assyrians used to strangle children into unconsciousness to perform circumcisions—also a practice in Italy until the seventeenth century. (Strangulation before genital cutting? No, no, no. Hell no.) And the truth was, it worked! When you’re deeply unconscious from lack of oxygen, you too can have your ear or your nether regions painlessly chopped off.
But the problem was, it killed, too. Hickman smartly included only the positive results when he reported his methods. But the medical community saw through the charade: He was either ignored or given scathing reviews. This one from The Lancet, entitled “Surgical Humbug,” said that the world would “laugh him to scorn if he were to recommend a man who was about to have a tooth drawn to be previously hanged, drowned, or smothered for a few minutes, in order that he may feel no pain during the operation.” The writer also called Hickman’s work a “tissue of Quackery” and “humbug” and signed this piece of work, “I am, &tc, ANTIQUACK.”
Ouch. One wonders if Hickman gave himself a dose of carbon dioxide to render himself senseless after that burn. Still, it’s a good thing that Hickman’s idea didn’t take off. After all, carbon dioxide as an anesthetic is as good as using a noose. Fatal suffocation is an irreversible side effect.
Henry Hill Hickman. Note the unconscious or possibly dead puppy under the glass.
Chloroform: Inhale Deeply …
Edinburgh physician James Young Simpson was another nineteenth-century pioneer in anesthesia. That is, if pioneering meant inhaling random substances with your colleagues, just to see what would happen. After fishing a bottle of chloroform from under a pile of trash (he had assumed it was probably not worth the try before), he and his friends started sniffing deeply. Chloroform has a sickly sweet smell, and before long giddiness sets in with a buzzing in the ears and heavy limbs. The inhalers began laughing (the “preliminary stage of excitement,” Simpson explained), then talking way too much, before bam! They all fell unconscious, and in the process, trashed the dining room where the sniffing occurred.
James Young Simpson and friends meet their match in chloroform.
After they awoke, they decided chloroform was pretty awesome, so they sniffed it multiple times to make sure it rendered them as silly and unconscious as it had before. Mrs. Simpson’s niece joined in, exclaiming, “I’m an angel! Oh, I’m an angel!” before passing out.
Chloroform is a simple molecule. Take methane (the main component of natural gas), replace three of its hydrogens with three chlorines, and you get chloroform. Simpson soon began championing chloroform as anesthesia in surgery, and it became an attraction during the mid-nineteenth-century party frolics that also featured ether sniffing (more on that later).
As with most drugs that mask pain, it wasn’t long before we started confusing comfort with cure. Perhaps people figured, If it makes me feel woozy and numb, surely it’s good for me. Chloroform began showing up in various pharmaceuticals, like Gibson’s Linseed Licorice and Chloroform Lozenges and Bee Brand White Pine and Tar Cough Syrup. They claimed to help all diseases of the throat and lungs (though chloroform is actually quite irritating) and to cure tuberculosis (they didn’t). Other nostrums promised to help ills such as vomiting, diarrhea, insomnia, and pain. As a sedative, it made sense for those latter complaints, but chloroform is far from a perfect cure-all. It’s deadly.
“Sudden sniffer’s death” killed one too many patients given chloroform. Healthy patients died inexplicably, due to heart arrhythmias, as well as respiratory and heart failure. Chloroform can also cause liver and kidney toxicity and is probably carcinogenic. By the twentieth century, it fell out of favor due to its dangers and is now a remnant of murder mysteries as a favorite (albeit imperfect) killing agent.
Rolling on the Floor Laughing My Gas Off
Apparently, finding new gases for people to inhale was all the rage in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. The Pneumatic Institution for Relieving Diseases by Medical Airs opened in the late 1700s in Bristol, and its founders tried a lot of dubious treatments. Humphry Davy, who joined in 1798 and contributed breakthroughs on respiratory physiology and anesthesia, had a scary method to figure out whether certain gases were safe or not: He inhaled them himself. (Are you sensing a pattern with anesthesia pioneers?)
Carbon monoxide was one such gas. He noted: “I seemed to be sinking into annihilation” but luckily didn’t die. With hydrogen gas: “A bystander informed me that … my cheeks became purple.” Brave dude. But he did realize that nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, took away toothache pain in 1800. He also realized it could make you nauseous, after he thoughtfully drank a bottle of wine in eight minutes flat, took a five-quart hit of laughing gas, and immediately puked.
The original title of this piece was “Prescription for Scolding Wives.” Women’s rights had a ways to go.
Oh, and the Pneumatic Institution? It closed after none of the gases they experimented with actually cured lung diseases, including tuberculosis. Davy’s research was forgotten for some time, partly because of the Pneumatic Institution’s complete failure to heal anyone and partly because Davy switched his curious mind from soporific subjects to a more energizing field of study—electrophysiology.
Nitrous oxide for medicinal purposes was shelved for the time being. But it would become a recreational drug used at parties for several decades in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until 1844 that American dentist Horace Wells decided to continue investigating Davy’s previously unacknowledged anesthetic properties of the gas. Wells had his own tooth pulled under nitrous oxide and, finding it painless, went public. He built a breathing apparatus and asked surgeon John Collins Warren (a founder of Massachusetts General Hospital and the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery) to perform an amputation using the gas. When the patient refused, a volunteer medical student from the crowd allowed a tooth to be extracted. The gas wasn’t given properly—perhaps Wells’s new apparatus failed—and the student felt everything.
Poor Wells suffered horrible embarrassment and would eventually become addicted to chloroform. He grew mentally unstable and, after throwing sulfuric acid onto prostitutes, committed suicide in the infamous Tombs prison in New York City.
Later in the 1860s, dentists gave nitrous oxide another chance. Other medical professionals adopted it in lieu of ether and chloroform, both of which were problematic. Perhaps Wells sleeps more soundly in his grave knowing that nitrou
s oxide continues to be used as a sedative to this day.
Perhaps not.
Clockwise, from lower left: Boyle’s apparatus, which allowed for greater control over the flow of anesthesia (1917); the Junker inhaler, first to use a rubber bellows to move air over the liquid (1867); anesthesia face mask (early 1900s); the Ombredanne inhaler, with a felt-packed metal sphere for absorbing liquid ether (1907); another face mask, with bottles of chloroform.
No Humbug? Let’s Frolic!
William Morton was a Boston dentist who’d attended the failed demonstration of Horace Wells. Morton wouldn’t make the same mistake. Instead of nitrous oxide, he investigated ether inhalation. “Sweet oil of vitriol,” also known as diethyl ether, ethyl ether, or just plain ether, was first synthesized in the sixteenth century by adding sulfuric acid to ethanol. It was used (uselessly) for treatment of respiratory infections, bladder stones, and scurvy in the eighteenth century. But in the 1840s, its use as an anesthetic had finally arrived.
Morton placed drops of it on the gums of his patients before tooth extractions and found it anesthetized the area. The next step? He started dousing his pet goldfish with it. His wife, Elizabeth, wasn’t happy about this, but Morton continued. He began eyeing their pet spaniel, Nig. Elizabeth put her foot down, but Morton anesthetized little Nig anyway. One can imagine that marriage wasn’t exactly blissful in the Morton household.
On October 16, 1846, Morton took his findings to a public exhibition with the same Dr. Warren who’d performed the botched procedure with Wells and nitrous oxide. In a surgical theater at Massachusetts General Hospital, Warren removed a neck tumor from a patient under ether anesthesia, directed by Morton. At the close of surgery, as the patient woke up, pain-free, Dr. Warren announced, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug!”
(The definition of humbug, we should have mentioned, is deceptive or false behaviors. It is also a peppermint candy, but surely Dr. Warren meant the former.)
A replica of Morton’s ether inhaler.
The surgical theater at Mass General was soon nicknamed “The Ether Dome” (not a Mad Max movie) and the historical date, Ether Day. Unfortunately, Morton took his discovery down an exploitative and quackish road. He colored the ether and put in additives to mask the scent, renaming it “Letheon” after the mythical Greek river, Lethe, which imparted oblivion and forgetfulness to drinkers. He patented Letheon a month after that fateful introduction to the world, though it was soon obvious his patent was simply for ether. The medical community in America and abroad derided Morton for trying to keep the discovery—an easily created substance—from benefitting mankind. Morton’s reputation never recovered.
But ether’s reputation continued to gain ground. Shortly after Morton’s initial successful demonstration, Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term anesthesia in a private letter to him. Ether was soon used extensively for surgical anesthesia, which is great, except for three problems—it was highly flammable, caused nausea and vomiting, and irritated the lungs (which is interesting, given that physicians used it to treat pulmonary inflammation a century earlier). Also, it had a really stinky odor that stuck with patients.
It had developed another reputation—one for recreational abuse and quack medicines.
Ether showed up on shelves to treat colic and diarrhea. Hoffman’s Drops, containing one part ether to three parts alcohol, was said to cure feminine ills such as cramps but easily became an addictive cure-all.
What was worse, ether abuse was socially acceptable. In the mid-nineteenth century, parties called ether frolics or jags became common. Participants would inhale ether, making them giddy, intoxicated, and often unconscious. One of the physicians who participated, Crawford Long, was a slimeball about it. After getting a supply, he boasted, “We have some girls in Jefferson who are anxious to see it taken, and you know nothing would afford me more pleasure than to take it in their presence and to get a few sweet kisses.” What a lech.
It wasn’t all frolicking about with gross men. Recreational users would wake up with bruises and injuries. Some died. One gentleman unfortunately smoked tobacco while using ether, and an onlooker noted, “Won day after a dose uv it, he wint to light his pipe and the fire cot his breath and tuk fire inside.”
One physician, a Dr. Kelly in Ireland, decided that ether would be the cure for alcoholism. Sure, just switch one addictive substance for another; that’ll do. “Dr. Kelly’s Remedy” was given to patients as a nonalcoholic alternative. It was a “liquor on which a man could get drunk with a clean conscience.” Sure it was. But many towns began to reek from the ether stink, literally (it smells pungent, sweet, but with an unpleasant solvent odor). Finally, the British government classified ether as a poison and began to regulate its sale in 1891.
Good thing, too. Besides being addictive, flammable, and occasionally deadly, ether caused some pretty profound burping, hiccuping, and noxious farting.
A reenactment of Morton and Warren’s first surgery with ether.
Anesthetics Today
Today, most of us will have used anesthetics at some point in our lives, whether it be for a tooth pulling or surgery. We owe a lot to the horrible experimentation and occasional unhappy endings that accompany these histories. Chloroform and ether anesthetics have been culled from the shelves and hospitals, as safer medicines, including sedative-hypnotic agents such as propofol (nicknamed “milk of amnesia” for its white color), opioids such as fentanyl, benzodiazepines such as midazolam, and many others have replaced them. We have become ever more specific in how anesthetics are used. Local nerve-blocking drugs such as novocaine make dental procedures painless. Spinal and epidural anesthesia minimize side effects like breathing problems or cardiac risks from general anesthesia. Though extremely safe these days, general anesthesia inherently carries with it drug-specific risks, including death—which increases the sicker you are going into surgery.
Lulling the human body into a short-term comatose state with a Lazarus happy ending is not to be done carelessly or with just any drug. And for the record, it’s a good thing that laughing gas/chloroform/ether parties are over. People would have to find other legal (or illegal) ways to frolic instead.
The Men’s Health Hall of Shame
The Oxford English Dictionary defines virile as “having strength, energy, and a strong sexual drive.” Merriam-Webster cuts to the chase, defining virility simply as “manhood.” We can thank ancient Greece and Rome, where brawniness was combined with self-control, confidence, political engagement, sexual proliferation, and high levels of energy to create a masculine ideal that—with some variations—has been passed down to us through the ages.
Now, of course, achieving the masculine ideal of virility is fraught with complications and the potential for insecurities. Men everywhere are plagued with nagging questions of self-doubt: What if I lose this competition? What if I don’t get this job? What if I can’t grow a beard? What if I go bald? What if I can’t “get it up”?
These are the thoughts that have kept men awake at night throughout the history of Western civilization. And these fears have always been exploited for financial gain by quack medical practitioners. Exhibit A: An advertisement for the “perfect male organ developer” (an early vacuum device for erectile dysfunction) boldly stated that “A man who is sexually weak is unfit to marry. Weak men hate themselves.” What follows are a few quack-endorsed ways for weak men to hate themselves a little less.
Nuxated Iron
What do baseball great Ty Cobb, boxing champion Jack Dempsey, and Pope Benedict XV all have in common? All three offered high-profile endorsements to “Nuxated Iron.” Latching on to the eternal male quests for vitality and virility, “Nuxated Iron” claimed to restore “bodily or mental vigor” by increasing iron levels in your bloodstream. Although the product did indeed contain ferrous sulfate (iron) and a tasty touch of oil of cinnamon, it also contained nux vomica (strychnine), a neurotoxin that would, if taken in a high enough dose, poison you. Horrifically. (See Strychnine, page
72.)
Nuxated Iron endorsed by the pope, y’all.
The Stephenson Spermatic Truss
The Stephenson Spermatic Truss arrived on the scene in 1876, ready to help curb men of their masturbatory tendencies by providing a cumbersome and inconvenient way to tie your penis to your leg. Apparently the device wasn’t quite effective enough, as later versions included little spikes that would bite into your penis should you have the misfortune of becoming aroused.
The Stringer Self-Treating Device
The dubiously named Stringer self-treating device combined every possible method of keeping the penis erect into one package. The company promoted it as “four in one—vacuum, moist-heat, vibration, and electricity.” And the device managed to combine hot water, an induction coil, an electric current, a vacuum, and even an electrode that could be coated with Vaseline and inserted a few inches into the rectum for the added benefit of a “prostate massage.” The company assured consumers that it “was the most wonderful discovery since the world began.”
The Bowen Device in all its terrible glory.
The Bowen Device
Intended to discourage masturbation, the Bowen would not seem out of place in the sex toy chest of a dominatrix today. It was basically a penis cap attached to the pubic hair by little chains. The more aroused you got, the more the little chains pulled on your pubic hair. Ouch.
The First Penis Ring
Around 1200 the first penis rings were invented in China. Creatively made from, of all things, the eyelids of a goat, the penis rings purposefully left the eyelashes intact to increase sexual pleasure. Let that visual sink in for a moment. A few hundred years later, the Chinese moved on to ivory rings, an obvious improvement for both men and goats.