Before Doctors Knew About Germs, How Did Americans Survive Getting Sick?

For most of American history, nobody knew what made people sick. Not the doctors, not the professors, not the President. Germs were invisible, and nobody believed that something too small to see could kill a grown man. So Americans blamed bad air, drained their own blood, swallowed mercury, gave babies morphine syrup, shared one tin cup with strangers, and let doctors operate with unwashed hands. Some of it cost a President his life. Pull up a chair with Silas, an old general-store keeper, for 10 things Americans did before doctors knew about germs, and what each one cost them. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 Life before germ theory 0:59 #1 Bad Air 2:46 #2 Bloodletting 4:48 #3 Mercury Pills 6:26 #4 Baby Syrup 8:43 #5 The Common Cup 9:55 #6 The Spittoon 11:19 #7 The Pest House 13:22 #8 Dirty Hands 15:00 #9 The Bloody Apron 17:03 #10 The President's Doctors 19:36 Every bar of soap is a lesson In this video: • How George Washington's doctors took about five pints of his blood • Benjamin Rush's mercury "thunderclappers" and the Lewis and Clark latrine • Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, the morphine medicine called a "baby killer" • Why Kansas banned the public drinking cup, and how the Dixie Cup was born • The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia • "Laudable pus," Civil War surgery and the doctors who killed President Garfield Subscribe for more stories about how Americans really lived in the 1700s–1930s. #history #americanhistory #medicalhistory