I really like this time of year. The frost on the pumpkins, the leaves on the ground, and the promise of scary little children knocking and begging for sweets on the 31st.
It’s a lot of fun. Plus, there is an entire genre of movies to blow the dust off of and watch again.
It’s been my experience that a lot of us look at Halloween as an opportunity to dress up, and even behave in a way we wouldn’t dare to the rest of the year.
Even at some medical practices you’ll see the staff doing a fun theme day at work, with witches and ghosts and super-heroes galore.
Good times. After all, it has to be fairly common knowledge by now that so much of the health of the organism depends on its attitude regarding its own well-being.
Especially we humanoids. Undead, zombie, or otherwise.
Here’s an idea for you, and take this or leave it as you see fit: what about celebrating the advances of medicine since good old Louie Pasteur by going toward the more obscure medieval practices of medicine in bygone eras?
Warning: this could get disgusting, and very scary!
The Obsolete and the Macabre
Leechcraft
Yeah, this was a thing. Putting leeches on people deliberately dates back to Ancient Egypt (so much for the alien intelligence theories) with the idea that bloodletting could provide relief for headaches and many other minor ailments.
It grew in popularity with the Roman Empire as well when a follower of good ol’ Hippocrates named Galen was convinced the health of the human body was reliant on a balance of the “four humors:” blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Leeches and bloodletting played heavily into this theory of medicine, and much to our modern disgust, grew in popularity and practice.
Many believed it was an efficacious treatment for the bubonic plague centuries later. Really? But wait, it gets worse…
The Black Death
We are coming out of the other end of COVID-19 pandemic, the worst global medical disaster since the Spanish Flu of 1918, but in relative terms we’ve all had it easy in relation to the bubonic plague, also known as the black death in Europe.
From 1348 to 1350 it is believed that about 37% of Europe dropped dead from this epidemic, or an estimated 1.5 million out of 4 million.
If you got it, you were most likely gone in three days. Besides bloodletting, they also tried cutting open the bodies of freshly killed pigeons to the affected area of the body. Hence the high mortality rate, you would assume. I can just hear the young girls now: “ewww, gross!”
Speaking of Egypt…
The Egyptian civilization was advance in many ways (as was Greece, for that matter), but this next bit is pretty awesome.
They pioneered pharmacology with treatments for many ailments available, but a staple ingredient in many of them was animal dung. Guess they didn’t know much about infections then.
They also used to bandage wounds with fresh meat, and for burns it’s said they would use a poultice of black mud on day one followed up with animal feces.
Yecch, disgusting.
Amputations
I got into this, and frankly wondered why they bothered trying before the advent of the screw tourniquet. Prior to this innovation in the early 18th century amputations routinely resulted in the patient’s death.
Besides using dirty instruments and unsterile fields these poor hapless souls met their maker through extreme shock from intense pain as well as blood loss.
Of course, if you show up for work at your doctor’s office dressed up as a gory amputee it probably would not go over well. Is there a way to pull this off tastefully? (Get it? I got a pun in there!)
Come to Think of It…
I’m wondering if we wouldn’t all be better off if your staff just did the whole Civil War-era nurse or Spiderman thing.
I mentioned earlier I like horror and Halloween-themed movies this time of year, and I suppose some of these ideas are better suited for a future indie film project.
I suppose I was amused digging this information up, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.
However you celebrate this second-highest spending holiday of the year (yup, right behind Christmas), we hope you have a safe and spooktacular Halloween, and your kids have the time of their lives.
My favorite part is the little ones all dressed up, doing their thing. I’m so grateful that this tradition lives on in our little part of the city.
What’s yours?