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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Don't worry, darling, I have giant fennel
The history and mystery of the plant that may have been one of the first contraceptives.
By Susan McCarthy
[07/01/99]

Going right through you
The diet pill Xenical reduces fat absorption, but may cause unpleasant side effects.
By Sharon Lerner
[06/30/99]

Column
The invisible woman
As age creeps into my body, my hands keep creeping into younger men's pants.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[06/29/99]

Books
"Living in the Lightning: A Cancer Journal"
One woman learns how to manage her fear.
By Natalie Robins
[06/28/99]

Sexpert Opinion
Still insatiable
Porn legend Marilyn Chambers makes a steamy comeback.
By Susie Bright
[06/26/99]

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By Mary Roach

July 2, 1999 | 1899 was not a good year to contract VD. In the 1899 Merck's Manual of Therapeutic Indications, treatments for gonorrhea -- or "gleet," as it was also then known -- included boric acid, "blisters to the perineum in obstinate cases," cod liver oil and/or "copaiba locally smeared on a bougie and introduced."

Oddly enough, the Merck's Manual represented the state of the art for medicine in its day. "They really thought they were on the cutting edge of modern science," says Dr. Robert Berkow, who has edited the Merck Manual -- then and now, the bestselling physician's reference book -- for the past 25 years. The 1899 edition is being reprinted and packaged alongside the 1999 edition, as a way to celebrate the centennial of the Merck Manual and to make people stop bitching about HMOs and be thankful they're not being given carbolic acid for their eye infections.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

"It wasn't until around 1920," Berkow told me, "that the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter." In 1899, pneumonia patients were still being bled. (George Washington is now thought to have been done in not by pneumonia, but by overzealous bleedings on the part of his physician.) Poisons and acids were the aspirin and ibuprofen of the day. Arsenic and strychnine appear as treatments for literally dozens of ailments, from baldness and irritability to angina pectoris. Bedwetting was treated with belladonna, aka deadly nightshade ("very useful for children, but the dose must be large").

The trick was to choose your doctor well. Turn-of-the-century medicine had a distinctively good-cop, bad-cop quality. While one doctor might advocate "leeches, back of ears" as a treatment for headaches, another would prescribe sitz baths. Under Seasickness we find both "champagne, iced, small doses frequently repeated" and "mustard plaster to the epigastrium." Depending on whom you went to, a sprained ankle might be treated with a "hot foot bath prolonged for hours" or a cold douche.

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