Today if you are sick you could go to the hospital get tested and find out what’s wrong with you .Well, back in the day they had more odd methods that you would find disturbing today and thankfully advancements have been made in modern medicine so we don’t have to go through a lot of things on the list.

Animal and Human waste Doctors would take waste from different animals and prescribe them to patients to help treat their illnesses. For example, the white part of dog poop was used to treat sore throats, it was also applied to open wounds. Sheep poop was used to treat jaundice and sometimes in unique cases they’d prescribe elephant or alligator poop but since it was easier to get dog poop they used it a lot.

Unsurprisingly this made the patients worse because what you do expect when you consume poop ?Poop wasn’t the only thing used as medicine though, urine was used by soldiers on the battlefield as an antiseptic to clean out their wounds so it was not uncommon for them to pee on each other’s wounds for that purpose.

Urine was also used by some women to prepare their face and skin for beauty treatments and parents would mix urine with ash to relieve their babies of a diaper rash.

To find out what was wrong with their patients doctors had a urine chart and used the color and smell to detect what was wrong with their patient. Today urine is still used to find out a patient’s illness but not like the way it was used then because the doctors would sniff and taste the urine, something doctors today would definitely not do.

Bloodletting is the process of relieving the body of bad blood causing an infection, doctors would cut a vein or an artery to let the blood out and sometimes they used leeches to suck out the bad blood.

Trephination This was another practice by medieval doctors which involved drilling holes into the bone to relieve pressure and yes it’s as gruesome as it sounds. It was used to treat blood clots and head injuries, it was also used to treat those believed to be possessed by evil spirits.

Cataract Surgery are the buildup of protein in the eye that causes one’s vision to be blurry , a doctor would treat this by using a big thick needle to push the cornea behind the eye and taking out the cataracts. Barbers were the ones who commonly performed this surgeries.

Can you imagine going to cut your hair today and finding out your barber also performs eye surgery? Would you trust him to do that too?

These are just some of the insane medical practices in the medieval era, I don’t think we realize how lucky we are that we don’t have to resort to any of these treatments today when we are sick it’s no wonder many people died before the age of thirty back in those days.