So, did they have any drugs that actually worked besides laudanum and "bark"? My reading of Jack Aubrey books suggests that medicine then was mostly about trauma care and bedside manner.
Plenty of stuff. For example, Mercury, which was used as an ointment and a laxative, among other uses. Here's a surprisingly readable excerpt from a medical text written in 1787: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5545546/
Plants, mushrooms and animals have contained active substances forever, it would be surprising that after millenniums of trials and errors, the people of this time didn't settle on a few things that worked.
Sure, but are there examples besides aspirin and opiates? Unsurprisingly those are pain medications, since it was immediately obvious that they work.
The other class of drug that would obviously be recognized as effective are psychoactives such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine.
By contrast I can't imagine how they could judge the efficacy of e.g. blood pressure medications back in those days, even though there are purely herbal treatments like aged garlic that certainly do have an effect.
Another notable category of ancient drugs is laxatives.
The first synthetic drugs did not begin to appear until around the mid-1800s. In 1832 chloral hydrate was produced, which was the first synthetic sleeping drug, but it wasn't used clinically until 1869.
Pretty much everything we now use as herbal tea, if highly concentrated, will have a notable effect.
E.G: Thyme has well known antimicrobial properties and thymol is (or at least was) a component of commercial mouthwash.
Even when we don't make drugs out of the plant itself, it could have been used for the properties we know about today.
E.G: common vervain is known to have diuretic properties, so it's not a long shot to think it has been used for this particular reason at some point. Today we use diuretic to treat heart failure, liver cirrhosis, or hypertension. While they may not have had any way to catalog all this, it seems unlikely nobody ever associated the consumption of a lot of diuretic with people getting better for one reason or another.
People were not dumb, and there were a lot of them, for a long time. They likely tried a lot of combinations of things, on purpose or by accident.
That people tend to think of our ancestors as being less intelligent is one of my pet peeves. There is no reason to even suspect that they weren't at least as smart as modern man.
What they lacked was the accumulation of knowledge that time gives. "If I see further, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
Also, many of them were too busy doing repetitive tasks and didn't have time to innovate. Technology freed us from many of the repetitive tasks that were required for survival, so we have more available brain time. Also, improved communication helps us avoid wasting time discovering the same thing over and over.
Medieval peasants had the same brain as we have, but without proper education, limited comfort and material means, days spent working the land, and slow and limited communication, no wonder much findings came of them. And because they didn't have the tools we have today, a lot of peasants were needed to keep the general population fed. Only the higher classes had the means to conduct proper research.
Today, at least in developed countries, it is like all of us, including farmers are "high class". We all have access to knowledge, instant worldwide communication, and some level of comfort. Repetitive, draining jobs are still a thing, but on a global population level, we need less of them for survival. Not everyone is a genius, but we have a much greater pool of available geniuses, and their abilities are better exploited.
Counterpoint, look around all all of the dumb people currently alive. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, true, but that giant is standing on a brobdingnagian mountain of stupid people.
Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the medical practice of herbalism.
And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my mind.
Plants are where we get a lot of medicines from, and while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that information not get spread around (it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's still totally possible to do so.
> No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a pill out of the part that works.
No, the west makes a pill out of the part that's commercially profitable, which is a very different set of criteria than "works". Things like shelf life/stability, cost and availability, dose:response curves that are very predictable for the entire human population, etc.
What goes into pills has far more to do with what works for business than what works for people.
It's overly reductionist to assume that all herbal remedies are the result of 1, maybe 2 active ingredients. The incentive for making a pill is less about efficacy and more about patentability. I can't patent camphor, but I can patent a 3% menthol & 3% camphor ointment suspended in a gel base (Fast Freeze).
I don't think it's fair to say the west as a supposed monolith rejects "woo", especially given the popularity of pseudoscience re: vaccines, homeopathy, Reiki, acupuncture, cleanses, etc.
It sounds like you’re implying there is Western medicine and “pseudoscience”.
In other parts of the world they call this crap “white people medicine” and stick with the natural remedies. It just lacks a shiny seal of approval from the FDA/EU regulatory body, which makes it “pseudoscience”. We all know that science is totally incorruptible and always true though!
Why take a thing that’s been known for thousands of years to be perfectly safe, when you can take this thing invented in a lab and tested on mice for 10?
> George Washington woke up at 2 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1799, with a sore throat. After a series of medical procedures, including the draining of nearly 40 percent of his blood, he died that evening.
Old medicine and medical treatments were absolutely lethal compared to what we have in modern times.
We certainly improved, but in 1799 I think it was already the age of pseudoscientific medicine, where people thought they were superior to traditional herbalist, simply because they read some books. In other words, I don't think any traditional medicine man would have done that treatment.
(Apart from that, I surely go to a hospital if I am really sick, but for everything light, I rather find something else, than some drug, where I don't know if it is helping me, or the doctors pension fund)
Iatrogenic deaths are still incredibly high today. Modern medicine is the evolution of the doctors regarded highly enough to treat the president, not the people who filled their prescriptions in the woods.
Earth has been known to be flat, women and POC have been known to be inferior and homosexuality has been known to be a sin.
But thankfully, humanity moves on, and among other innovations, came up with such things as statistical methods and drug testing. But if you so desire, you're absolutely free to distrust modern western medicine — after all, a lot of prominent people do, for example, late Steve Jobs.
America doesn't prescribe some remedies, herbal or otherwise, because they aren't FDA approved due to an unnecessarily burdensome approval process that costs tens of millions of dollars to navigate, alongside a culture of civil lawsuits that causes doctors to act with excessive caution.
The smelling salts would definitely work. The oil of Wormwood probably worked to remove intestinal worms. A lot of the others I’m not sure passed the “first, do no harm” test.
