Barbaric Medical Practices Throughout History

Just watch "The Knick" with Clive Owen if you want to be grossed out by turn-of-the-century medical practices.

How about when they used to drive a metal sound up your urethra to prevent urinary tract adhesions secondary to syphilitic infection?

In 1960, a 12-year-old boy living in my hometown on the SF Peninsula, near Stanford, was lobotomized by the same Walter Freeman who had operated on Rosemary Kennedy in 1941. While the boy was lying on the examining table in the doctor's office, Freeman plunged an ice pick into the boy's eye socket and swirled it around. There was actually nothing wrong with the boy to warrant such a drastic operation, except that his horrible stepmother disliked him because of his disobedience and daydreaminess.

Because he was so young, his brain recovered to some extent (but not really), and many years later he wrote a book about the whole nightmarish experience called "My Lobotomy."

I can't believe that quack, Freeman, was allowed to mutilate untold numbers of hapless men, women, and children for more than 20 years after he reduced Rosemary Kennedy to a partly paralyzed, crippled shell. What a monster.

I remember Dr McCoy raising hell about barbaric dialysis in ST4

John Money of the Johns Hopkins gender program was monstrous, if only for what he did to poor David Reimer. (And I say that as someone who isn't all "Drop the T.")

Let's not forget the court-imposed diethylstilbestrol given to men to curb their "deviant" sexual impulses as an alternative to lengthy prison terms. Either take the hormones and stop having sex with men, or be behind bars for a very long time. Rapists and child molesters get it now under certain circumstances, but in times not too distant from our own, a homosexual was seen as being no different than someone who attacks, rapes, and even murders women and children.

Today some sex offenders receive Depo-Provera (the birth control injection) as chemical castration -- now DES is used only in limited instances to treat prostate cancer.

But yeah, the point stands ...

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

You wouldn't believe what medical science has tried on me, to no avail.

ECT. Electro Convulsive Therapy. I had three shock treatments and then said "NO MORE!"

SJWism

No mention of foot binding?

That wasn't a medical practice, R12, mothers did it to make their daughters more beautiful. They considered it no worse than getting their girl her first pair of high heels.

Circumcision wins the thread. Never have so many, been so mutilated, on such false grounds.

What was the Kennedy familys' issue with Rosemary? Was she genuinely mentally Ill or were they just upset that she was sexually active?

The David Reimer case is extremely disturbing to say the least, I had never heard of it.

Between seeing what happens to Jessica Lange’s character in Frances and the glimpses of the frontal lobotomy in Ratched, circumcision seems like a walk in the park.

R16 it was disturbing, but it was also an unusual method of circumcision that caused the injury.