The Little Museum of Horrors

Mothers giving heroin to babies to make them sleep; people getting surgery with no anesthesia; barbers cutting off parts of people’s bodies; doctors using unsterilized instruments in surgery, using the same instruments on people and animals, and giving people “medicines” that make them sick or even die… this was the reality of medical practice in the 1800s. 

down in new orleans

You can learn all about this at the pharmacy of America’s first licensed pharmacist, Louis J. Dufilho, Jr., who got his license in 1816. It is in the historic French Quarter of the city of New Orleans, and it is now the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum.

The exhibits at the museum include medical memorabilia, surgical and dental instruments, bottles of opium, perfumes, cosmetics and voodoo potions.

Apparently, if you go to the pharmacy at night, you can see the ghost of a doctor called Joseph Dupas. He lived there from 1857 until he died in 1867 and did voodoo rituals and horrible experiments on slaves.

INTERVIEW: medical madness

We went on the scary tour of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. Afterwards we met with tour guide Ruth Ex, who began by talking about some of the bizarre medical beliefs of the 19th century:

Ruth Ex (Standard American accent): So there are many things from the 1800s that we can look back on now and be kind of horrified that people were interacting with and ingesting. Lead is a really big one. At one point, baby bottles were made out of lead because it had a sweet taste and they thought that children would like that. So they just really had no idea of the correlation between lead and the illness it was causing. Mercury and arsenic, for instance, were both used as medical treatments ‘cause medical practitioners at that time period were fond of this idea of purgative medicine. So they liked to give people medicines that were either extreme laxatives or made them throw up or things like that because they thought that would purge the sickness from their body. So people were given a lot of things that made them feel really immediately bad, and doctors thought that’s just what healing felt like. So there’s that, also the widespread use of opiates to treat all types of ailments. There was really not an understanding of addiction at that time, and I mean addiction science has really... still has a long way to go, but it was really in its infancy at that point.

by george

And then there was the horrific custom of bloodletting:

Ruth Ex: Bloodletting is part of the idea of purgative medicine, the idea that if you are sick, you need to purge certain things from your body, certain types of fluids, to heal from it. So doctors thought that certain ailments were an ailment of the blood, and they thought that they had (to) either physically cut you and release blood from your body or put leeches on you. They thought that was a way they could make room for healthy blood to regenerate. So that was a really common practice. Many people died of blood loss because they would be over-bled. That happened to George Washington, for instance.

love is blind

Things were also pretty weird when it came to cosmetics:

Ruth Ex: There were some very bizarre cosmetic trends in the 1800s. For instance, it was a fad for people to give themselves dilated pupils, which was achieved by using belladonna, which is a plant that does have medicinal properties, but is very harmful if used in the wrong way. So these belladonna eye drops would make you have these dilated pupils, these like big beautiful eyes or whatever, but eventually it would lead to blindness. People were also fond of giving themselves a semi-permanent blush, and this was achieved by using a topical application of a plant called nux-vomica, which strychnine is made from. So it’s a cream. You would put it on your cheeks and it would constrict your blood vessels and make it look like you had blush on. If you wore it often enough, though, it would just burst the blood vessels in your face and you would kind of constantly have this bizarre purplish bruised look to your face.

a woman’s place

And women were definitely second-class citizens when it came to medical practice in the 19th century:

Ruth Ex: A prevalent theory from the 1800s is that there was a constant battle going on in women’s bodies between their brain and their uterus, and if women were to pursue things like education or reading or even strenuous conversation, it would cause too much energy to go to their brains, which would cause atrophy of the uterus, then causing complete paralysis, hysteria or mannishness. 

See pharmacymuseum.org for more information.