Honey, Mud, Maggots, and Other Medical Marvels

Dates Covered: -
ISBN: 0395924928
HH Rating:

Our Take

Western medical doctors can be an arrogant lot. The health care system tends to reward the use of fancy drugs and absurd life-saving measures, warranted or no, and this bias relegates low-tech methods to the back of the back of the hypothetical bus. Certainly, history does not want for examples of medical quackery: folks tried to sweat out syphilis or treat it with mercury; even nowadays people try to sell homeopathic medicine, which is essentially water. However, this is not to say that human physicians have only learned how to think in the twentieth century and that thousands of years of colloquial observation ought to be pitched in the trash. On the contrary, some findings by ancient doctors are perfectly applicable today, even if shrouded in that most undignified category of scientific knowledge: the old wives' tale.

In their book Honey, Mud, Maggots, and Other Medical Marvels: the Science Behind Folk Remedies and Old Wives' Tales, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein explore a variety of medical techniques that sound comparatively silly and determine the efficacy of each. For example, they note that urine is sterile and can be used as for wound irrigation in a pinch:

British officers serving in the Sahara during World War II observed Arabs urinating on the open wounds of British soldiers. At first the British were shocked and interpreted the action as gross insubordination and an offense to flag and country.

We found this mildly amusing. In the Sahara, with no water around, folks figured out how to prevent wound infection with what they had. The Root-Bernsteins look at lots of other seemingly nutty ideas: maggots, bleeding, going to natural springs, and others. Most of these get a rudimentary treatment, a little scientific conjecture or anecdotal accounts, and a disclaimer towards the end of the chapter that more studies have to be done. This is too bad, really; you'd think that if our ancestors were onto something good we'd have looked a little more into it.

While usually those of the more liberal bent might take this as an opportunity to malign the much-impugned drug industry in this country for concentrating in the wrong areas, History House would rather focus on a few of the credentials cited in the book. A substantial portion of the urotherapy chapter comes from a firsthand account of urine drinking published in Continuum, which is a popular magazine put out for HIV-infected persons. Continuum holds the stance that HIV and AIDS are not related, a notion certain members of History House find preposterous, having worked firsthand with the virus for years.

That said, if you're not into home doctoring, the book is a jolly read. A fair number of the home remedies stem from American Appalachia, a place one might not expect to find indigenous folk medicine: all peoples, and not just Europeans and Arabs, have their own methods for dealing with medical problems. And despite a few lapses in scientific believability, the authors have a decent grasp of what sounds silly, and even possess a poetic ear:

Give or take an oiled penis or dung plug, most of these ancient contraceptives are believable today.
This represented a real breakthrough, since earlier pneumatic leeches had found these orifices, where real leeches had classically been used, inaccessible.
No wonder Herriot looked on that suppurating wound with trepidation!

We liked it. But while we believe that plenty of folk medicine has sound reasoning behind its use, the Root-Bernsteins are going to have to do better than cite nutball journals and eighteenth-century anecdotal accounts to make any case worth considering. Read it for the laudable pus and the crocodile dung.

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