The “remedy” was usually extra horrifying than the illness – as a result of the remedy was mercury, one of the vital well-known poisonous substances on the planet.
Within the 1800s and early 1900s, medical doctors usually prescribed mercury for syphilis and different venereal illnesses. It was an ointment; it was added to vapor baths; it was even used as a vaginal or urethral douche.
Sufferers dabbed it on their sores or inhaled it. Docs administered it utilizing a tool made by a French instrument-maker: a receptacle for holding the liquid mercury compound, with a inexperienced hose and attachments of varied sizes for insertion into the vagina or urethra.
The ensuing signs – extreme cramping, salivating, diarrhea, and vomiting – had been violently disagreeable. However for a lot of Nineteenth-century medical doctors and sufferers, that was how they knew the therapy was working.
On the time, many medical doctors nonetheless believed within the humoral idea of illness, relationship again to Hippocrates, a number of centuries BCE. The concept was that the human physique held a mixture of 4 humors, or fluids: black bile, yellow or pink bile, blood, and phlegm. Illness meant the humors had been out of whack; purging was thought to carry them into steadiness.
Syphilis, which affected 10% of England’s inhabitants on the finish of the Nineteenth century, has a cycle of remission and recurrence, so what seemed like a remedy was usually only a non permanent respite. That would make it onerous to inform what was truly serving to, what was hurting, and what was solely an phantasm. In the meantime, mercury-treated sufferers had been dying.
The “irritating impact” of douching with the mercury-containing compound was famous in a 1910 article with the unsparing title, “Poisoning by Mercuric Chloride via Vaginal Douches,” revealed within the Journal of the American Medical Affiliation. The doctor writer chronicles one significantly grisly case: a 35-year-old lady who sought medical care after 4 days of persistent vomiting.
Over the subsequent a number of days, she vomited blood, fell right into a stupor, and developed kidney failure. She died 1 week after consulting the physician.
A 1916 article within the British Medical Journal, “Perchloride of Mercury Poisoning by Absorption from the Vagina,” informed the story of a 27-year-old lady who douched with mercury perchloride tablets dissolved in water, then positioned one pill straight into her vagina. The article described her ache, swelling, cramping, diarrhea, and chronic vomiting, adopted by kidney failure. She died 6 days later.
“It’s evident that the absorption of the poison in poisonous portions will need to have taken place via the vagina,” wrote the writer of the 1910 article. “This case … should represent a warning to physicians that mercury can hardly be employed with security on this method.”
However that didn’t cease medical doctors from prescribing it.
Mercury has an extended historical past of medicinal use – and an equally lengthy litany of devastating negative effects, in keeping with Lydia Kang, MD, assistant professor of basic inner medication on the College of Nebraska Medical Heart and writer of Quackery: A Transient Historical past of the Worst Methods to Treatment All the pieces.
Teething powders containing calomel, also called mercurous chloride, was bought till 1948; it induced a situation known as pink illness in infants: icy, swollen, pink, and intensely itchy fingers and toes.
Mercury-laced “cures” for melancholy, constipation, influenza, and parasites induced an sickness generally known as mercurial erethism. Usually known as mad hatter’s illness after the Nineteenth century haberdashers who caught it from publicity in the course of the felting course of, mercurial erethism is a neurological dysfunction characterised by tremors, anxiousness, pathological shyness, and frequent sighing.
“Mercury grew to become a catch-all medication to purge in all these other ways,” Kang says. For syphilis, “they felt prefer it was doing one thing versus nothing.”
Sufferers who inhaled or consumed mercury suffered probably the most poisonous results, Kang says; a douche meant a smaller, shorter-lasting publicity. However repeated or extremely concentrated use might be deadly.
Salvarsan, an antimicrobial agent developed by a Japanese professor within the early 1900s, and penicillin, launched as a therapy for syphilis within the early Nineteen Forties, modified the sport. However mercury therapy endured for thus lengthy not solely due to the absence of simpler cures, says Kang. It was additionally the results of a cussed mindset.
“There have been individuals who had been fairly logical saying, ‘I feel the drugs is making me sicker than the syphilis,’ however their voices acquired drowned out. Established order could be very onerous to vary within the absence of data that may persuade a whole inhabitants and a complete era of medical employees to vary their minds.”
