20 Pioneer Cures Worse Than the Disease

Pioneer medicine and 19th century home remedies that were worse than the disease: Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, laudanum, calomel, bloodletting, coal oil for croup and snake oil. How frontier doctors and pioneer families treated the sick in the 1800s, from Gunn's Domestic Medicine to patent medicine history and the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. ▶ Watch next: 25 Deadly Things Inside Every Pioneer Home —    • 25 Deadly Things Inside Every Pioneer Home   ▶ Previous: 25 Strange Pioneer Tools and What They Were REALLY For —    • 25 Strange Pioneer Tools and What They Wer...   ▶ Also on the channel: How Pioneers ACTUALLY Went to the Bathroom —    • How Pioneers ACTUALLY Went to the Bathroom   November 1849: a doctor sick with cholera in a California tent swallows a steam doctor's "number six": "the remedy seemed worse than the disease." This video goes through 20 cures from American homes, trails and drugstores, 1793 to 1910: Gunn's and Dr. Chase's household books, soothing syrups, calomel and the lancet, bitters, cocaine drops and medicine shows, each checked against the books, medical journals, newspapers and court records of its time. One of the twenty did more harm than all the others. Which one? This is history, not medical advice. Many of these "cures" are poisons. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 California, 1849: a cure worse than the cholera 0:37 1. Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup: a spoonful for the baby 1:32 2. Goose grease for croup: Dr. Chase's recipe book 2:26 3. Sugar of lead: lead acetate in a croup remedy 3:25 4. Kerosene on sugar: an old croup remedy 4:21 5. Laudanum on the trail to Oregon, 1846 5:30 6. 87 empty bottles of soothing syrup 6:32 7. Godfrey's Cordial: opium made in the kitchen 7:42 8. Calomel: mercury as a household medicine 9:13 9. Bloodletting: Benjamin Rush and the lancet 10:38 10. Cholera on the Oregon Trail and how it was treated 12:08 11. Blistering with Spanish fly 13:01 12. Gunn's Domestic Medicine: boiling water and bleeding 14:07 13. Thomsonian steam doctors and lobelia 15:26 14. Amputation with a carving knife before anesthesia 16:37 15. Sappington's quinine pills: the cure that worked 18:01 16. Hostetter's Bitters: a 44% alcohol tonic 19:36 17. Cocaine toothache drops and catarrh powders 20:54 18. Snake oil: what was really in the bottle 22:09 19. Electric belts and quack cures 23:21 20. Kopp's Baby's Friend and the Pure Food and Drug Act 25:26 So which cure did the most harm? 27:36 Your turn: which would have reached your family? 📚 Main sources • John C. Gunn, Gunn's Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man's Friend (1830 and later editions): https://archive.org/details/gunnsdome... • A. W. Chase, Dr. Chase's Recipes (1870s editions): https://archive.org/details/drchasesr... • Alonzo Delano, Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings (1854): https://archive.org/details/lifeonpla... • Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (1848): https://archive.org/details/whatisawi... • J. S. Sappington, The Theory and Treatment of Fevers (1844): https://archive.org/details/theoryand... • Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud (1905): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44325 • American Medical Association, Nostrums and Quackery (1912): https://archive.org/details/nostrumsq... • W. F. M'Nutt, "Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup — a Poison" (1872): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... • National Park Service, the Henderson family on the Applegate Trail: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/chil... • Food and Drugs Act of 1906, U.S. Statutes at Large: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/S... 🖼 Book pages, advertisements, newspapers, period photographs and museum objects are public domain or CC0 (Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Nebraska Newspapers, Flickr Commons). Other scenes are illustrations based on the historical record; children are shown only from a distance. 🎵 Music (Pixabay Content License): Haunted Western by Grumpynora; Into The Unknown (Dark Western Cinematic) and The Wild Hunt (Dark Cinematic) by Big_Reggie; Dark Ambient by AtlasAudio; Dark Ambient Soundscape Dreamscape by Monume. Which of these 20 would have reached your family first: the syrup, the calomel, the lancet or the bitters? One word in the comments is enough. 🔔 Subscribe for new stories from the American frontier three times a week. #PioneerLife #MedicalHistory #FrontierHistory Теги pioneer medicine, 19th century home remedies, frontier doctors, patent medicine history, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, old west medicine, 1800s medicine, history of medicine, laudanum, bloodletting, calomel, snake oil, quack medicine, pioneer life, frontier history