Illustrated lecture and book signing with Nathan Belovsky, author of Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
Date: Thursday, September 26
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Produced by Morbid Anatomy
We complain, but modern-day medicine has been good to us. Not so the medicine of the nineteenth century, and for a good two thousand years before that. From the time of the ancient Greeks until relatively recently, even the best, most respected doctors did more harm than good, and hurt more patients than they helped.
In this illustrated lecture, Nathan Belofsky, author of Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages, will discuss medicine’s reckless “Heroic Age”, roughly 1780 to 1850. Desperate doctors of this era, armed with dangerous new tools and techniques, would do anything for a cure.
With acid and hot irons doctors blistered and burned their patients, even as respected European physicians raced to stamp out “spermatorrhea (wet dreams). Medical journals had doctors stick dried peas into freshly opened wounds-to promote pus and infection-and shove leeches into bodily cavities, though they sometimes got “lost” inside. Cutting-edge doctors used electricity to cure impotence and bad eyesight, while Benjamin Rush, Treasurer of the Mint and signer of the Declaration of Independence, hung his patients from the ceiling and “twirled” them for hours on end, to get blood flowing to their brains.
Copies of Strange Medicine will be available for sale, and wine will be served.
Nathan Belofsky is a writer and attorney living in Manhattan. Strange Medicine, his second book, has been lauded by Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and will soon be available in foreign translation. Visit the website at strangemedicine.com.