Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that can’t get away from ye-olde medical stories no matter how hard we try. It’s funny, but yeah… sorry all!

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Jenn, and if you happened to watch Netflix's Witcher series, I learned something new about it this week. The cursed, prickly-faced knight who turned out to be Ciri’s father is not a creation of the Witcher Universe. He’s actually based on a Brother’s Grimm story called The Hedgehog Boy.

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that if you pick up and put your ear up to a live crab you can hear what it sounds like to be attacked by a crab.

Crazy Medical Nonsense of Yesteryear Quiz

* http://bit.ly/2IZhlYD

I’ve spent some time talking about woo-woo nonsense, laughing at the ridiculous claims modern woo’s make about the curative power of bleach in your butt, porous stones in your hoohaw, or ward off the evil autistic spirits of vaccination. But what about the time before modern medicine? What about when seemingly intelligent people were recommending bloodletting and porcupine fucking?.. Ok, I don’t know that the last one is real, but it’s easily the most erotic of acupuncture…

And so, I present the “Crazy Medical Nonsense of Yesteryear Quiz” - bonus points are available on each question if you correctly guess if the “treatment” is still recommended by nutjobs.

There are 14 questions that all draw from the same answer pool, pictured below. Pair the cure described with the ailment listed for a chance to win!

1. In 1530, the egotistical, loud-mouthed, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, proposed that patients should be dosed with mercury salts to make them urinate and drool. Some of Paracelsus’ contemporaries recommended dosing a patient with mercury until the patient drools three pints of saliva—a sufficient volume to get rid of what common 16th-century disease?

Syphilis!

Paracelsus believed that syphilis was caused by invisible particles transmitted from one person to another—a good guess, given syphilis is caused by the microscopic bacteria Treponema pallidum—and that drooling copiously would flush the particles out of the patient. Even though mercury might kill syphilis bacteria in less-active infections, it might also kill the patient by causing ulcers, kidney failure, and brain damage.

Bonus: Nope, a quick google reveals that if it’s still used, the nutters are quiet about it. Most discussion of mercury in woo circles is about how it’s in vaccines and will give you autism.

2. Friar Agustín Dávila Padilla recorded in 1596 that an aging fellow cleric was ordered by doctors “to use a drink that in the Indies they call chocolate. It is a little bit of hot water in which they dissolve something like almonds that they call cacaos, and it is made with spices and sugar.” What were the doctors trying to cure with this delicious drink?

Kidney disease.

Dávila Padilla delicately relates that the cleric was suffering because “his urine was afflicted.”

Bonus: Despite “medical professionals” as far back as 1662 denying its efficacy chocolate is used to this day to treat things like: reducing cholesterol, raw coco for coughing, reduced natural insulin, lower blood pressure, antioxidants, preventing cancer, blood flow improvements, protecting skin from UV rays, preventing tooth decay, as a painkiller, and “good for your brain” … just about the only thing these woos and I can agree on is that chocolate can “improve moods”

3. The chocolate-loving friars wouldn’t have approved of their British contemporary John Gerard, a botanist who published The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes in 1597. In his herbal,