Questionable Health Tips Night:

Bread crusts = prophylactic antibiotics/antivirals.

Hints and Remedies for the Treatment of Common Accidents and Diseases and Rules of Simple Hygiene. Dawson W. Turner, 1882.

1975! G’lord! That’s the year that the last indigenous case of variola major occured. A girl from Bangladesh named Rahima Banu had that last case in October of 1975. There was a case of variola minor in Somalia in 1977, but 1975 is when the more serious form was eradicated in the wild.

caskette:

Giant ovarian tumor, 1851
Dr. Stanley B. Burns

It wasn’t as uncommon as one might think to find grotesquely overgrown ovaries, testicles, and lymph nodes, especially in the lower classes. Being unable to afford to see a doctor until it was clearly too late to do much was not uncommon, and charity hospitals didn’t have many beds. There weren’t emergency rooms back then, which are compelled to provide care. Or, if you live outside the US, there wasn’t the health care you’re able to get just by living.

 
Either way, cancers in the lower class were frequently left until the patient was dead or nearly dead, and once they got to medical care (if they ever did), they were curiosities to be marveled at, by simply still being alive. Because of this, many of the very severe cases that eventually made it to medical care after ca. 1850 were well documented, both in terms of being photographed and having the clinical presentations documented.

Medicine man Jes’akkid’, bending over an ill person. This was supposed to let him take the disease out of the body of the afflicted. 1885, Black River Falls, WI.