Apparently I badly want to go on my “stop making fun of plague doctors, they were ahead of their time and doing the best they could with the primitive equipment they had available” rant.

They weren’t stupid.

They shoved herbs in their breathing hose because they knew the air was bad and hoped it would help, and *they were right* in theory. The plague itself was not an airborn virus, but they couldn’t know that and it wasn’t the only thing killing people at the time anyway, and they covered *all* their bases. If they’d had the technological knowhow to make air tanks, or even better air filters, they would’ve. They just made the best air filters they could.

What we think they wore isn’t exactly what they wore, and what they actually wore would later be repurposed into scuba suits (and thus spacesuits too) and *actual hazmat suits*, because the theory was sound, the materials were just lacking, and honestly what they did with the materials they had was hardcore.

It honestly took doctors well into the twentieth century to get that level of obsessive attention to hygiene and cross-contamination back. A whole lot of babies and mothers wouldn’t’ve died, for instance, if a plague doctor instead of an obstetrician supported the birth because A PLAGUE DOCTOR WOULD KNOW TO WASH THEIR GODDAMNED HANDS.

Actual plague doctor’s outfits:

Who was responsible for turning plague doctors into laughingstocks instead of primative but honoured medical and scientific predecessors anyway?

Was it the Victorians? It was probably the Victorians. Those pretentious sanctimonious jerks ruined everything.

#i did not realize people made fun of plague doctors #ive mostly seen people freaked out by the aesthetic #they always seemed to me like a bittersweet example of humanity scared shitless #and still trying really really hard #i’d get very poetic about it #sometimes its a stare out the window and empathize with plague doctors kind of day and that’s just how it is #that’s just how growing up is #i feel like thanks victorians is a strong contender for thanks obama’s throne (tags via @cicadianrhythm)

but you almost forgot one of the coolest things!! 

supposedly some plague doctors would carry hollow canes in order to check the pulse without needing to use their hands or take off their gloves? it was sort of like a very early example of a stethescope

plague boys were smart af

Reblogging because I am an amateur historian, and yes this time it was the Victorians

Marie Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me

manchineel perfec t place for rest under in rain

shade very Soft and Comfort human sleep soundly put human under Manchineel Tree. Put Human Under Manchineel Tree. no problems ever under mancchineel tree because good Taste and Sweet fruit for tired hungry human. Amanchineel Tree yes a place for a human put human under manchineel tree can trust manchineel for giveing good shelter to human. friend manchineel

escaped medical leech

There are medical leeches!?

Yes! They work very hard to get their medical degrees. 

not this one, though. this one’s trying to ditch class. 

what was the class, color theory?

WHY THE HIFL WOULD YOU HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS!?

Also important to note they’re not random leaches found outside obviously. They’re “sterile” or as sterile as an animal can be, bred in specific environments and kept clean in the lab.

except this one, which is escaping

god I just. love ruthlessness as a character trait so much. sexy sexy sexy

this one. absolutely in love with this definition. give me a character who thinks like this and I’ll love them to pieces

It bothers me so much that the healthcare system relies so much on the patient's ability to advocate for themselves, organize their history, and be so persistent against every medical “professional” who says there’s nothing wrong/they can do. But so many struggle with fatigue, brain fog, and face such ingrained systemic barriers, that the people who need and deserve help and support can’t access it.

I saw something recently that resonated with me: “Access shouldn't depend on who has the energy to fight for it.” And I’ve never agreed with anything more.

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

Yeah, what's so interesting to me is that some of them did understand at least something! We see this in glimpses through history. And I suppose it was just from observation. They would learn by seeing that things could infect other things by touch. Kinda like any farmer breeding livestock would figure out that inbreeding was a problem, even if the Habsburgs didn't think so.

Examples:

Plague stones or vinegar stones are stones in England that have little dips in them that were filled with vinegar (disinfectant). People from a place that had plague in the 1660s (yes, I know that's post medieval) would put their money into the vinegar and leave it there in exchange for goods from a non-plague place. Isn't that fascinating? I thought of this often during the height of the pandemic. These people understood on some level that coins could carry infection and that vinegar could clean it.

And in 1403, when the future Henry V got an arrow in his face, his doctor poured wine (disinfectant) and honey (antimicrobial properties) into the wound and Henry survived!! He survived after getting an arrow deep in his face in the year 1403! So this doctor, John Bradmore, clearly understood something although he surely didn't know germ theory. I guess he knew that wine and honey had special properties that prevented a wound from festering. Apparently Bradmore came from a family of surgeons so maybe it was trial and error.

Back in Classical Antiquity, surgery involving the opening of the skull would sometimes involve cracking a fresh unfertilised egg on the would and then bandaging up. Because the egg was sterile.

hope u dont mind me keeping ur tags because ur right:

I’ll reblog this every time I see it.

[ID: a reddit post from Marylandman101.

what does it feel like to do heroin

A reply from [deleted]

Actually this is an obvious question but it’s not what you might think. Let me explain it to you, I’ve been an opiate addict for a long time and tried many drugs. Drugs that are ‘uppers’ have the most ‘obvious’ euphoria. For example if you take adderall/coke/meth/speed/MDMA you will get this shining bright euphoria, self confidence, energy, and other drug-specific feelings (for meth like you are king or for MDMA like you love everyone). However, you owe these drugs back what they delivered to you. After a meth binge, or lots of MDMA use, or staying up all night on coke you will feel like shit. To an extent this aspect is similar to an alcoholic hangover.

On the other hand, for many people who experiment with heroin they are underwhelmed (not including IV usage, but most experimenters rarely ever IV first time). They just feel good, chill, happy, but they feel like this spooky drug ‘heroin’ hasn’t delivered. They are just mellow. Oh obviously it has all been a lie they will think. Heroin isn’t spooky, it’s chill. It’s not addictive like everyone else thinks. It doesn’t make you do stupid shit or stay up all day and hallucinate like amphetamines or coke. It doesn’t empty your serotonin like MDMA or give you a hangover like alcohol. People tend to just think oh, what a nice drug.

So the next day they wake up and everything is normal. No headache or shitty feeling–just a slight afterglow of that nice feeling. Oh it was cheap as well! It only cost $10 for a whole night of being high! I thought people said heroin was expensive? And then next weekend comes… There are all these drugs I could do but I liked heroin. It didn’t fuck me up,‘I could still think clearly. No hangover. No feeling like shit later. I still was awake. It just made me happy and content with life. Oh and it’s only $10! Well, I should get some more for the whole weekend. This is great! I will use Heroin on the weekends now!

Now let’s say this person works and has responsibilities. He knows he can’t go into work drunk, or on MDMA, or high. So he doesn’t. It’s actually simple. But heroin… Well the user might actually find they do better work on heroin. Instead of being sad or grumpy or depressed with his job… he is just… happy. Mellow. Content. Everything is fine and the world is beautiful. It’s raining, it’s dark, I woke up at 5:30AM, I’m commuting in traffic. I would have had a headache, I would have been miserable, I would have wondered how my life took me to this point. This point I’m at right now. But no, no, everything is fine. Life is beautiful. The rain drops are just falling and in each one I see the reflection of every persons life around me. Humanity is beautiful. In this still frame shot of traffic on this crowded bus I just found love and peace. Heroin is a wonder drug. Heroin is better than everything else. Heroin makes me who I wish I was. Heroin makes life worth living. Heroin is better than everything else. Heroin builds up a tolerance fast. Heroin starts to cost more money. I need heroin to feel normal. I don’t love anymore. Now I’m sick. I can’t afford the heroin that I need. How did $10 used to get me high? Now I need $100. That guy that let me try a few lines the first time doesn’t actually deal. Oh I need to find a real dealer? This guy is a felon and carries a gun–he can sell me the drug that lets me find love in the world. No this isn’t working, I need to quit.

To answer your question, heroin feels nice. That’s all, it just feels very nice. You can make the rest up for yourself. Attach your own half-truths to this drug that will show you the world and for a moment you will feel as clever as Faust.

Edit: Thank you for the kind words. I received help and I’m doing well now. Luckily I was able to pull up and get help right before I entered the deadly downward spiral. Some of my friends have not done as well. Sorry to steal the limelight from OP

A reply to this from Ifuxdalion

Reading that was more haunting than any anti-drug campaign that I’ve been exposed to. Thanks. A lot.

End of reddit post.

The third image are tags on tumblr. They read #anti-drug campaigns should be run by recovering addicts #cause like #how are you gonna talk honestly about how a drug affects your life if youve never done it #how can you really communicate what it does to your life if you ignore the reasons people do drugs in the first place? #i dont think anyone’s gonna believe you when you say a drug is bad if you never acknowledge the way the drug makes you feel good #tags

End ID]

The thing that kills me about this, is that it frankly discusses the general misery and malaise that we put up with in our regular sober lives, and it says straight up that the drug makes it BEARABLE. This is the clearest and most straightforward description of “drug addiction is not a failure of personal strength and character, it is an attempt to medicate and make survivable the horrifying sociocultural conditions that we are being forced to accept as the normal cost of living.” It’s the Rat Park drug addiction hypothesis demonstrated in humanity.

Sometimes it’s hard to read fanfic when you’re studying herbalism.. when they have the character preparing a tincture to use that same DAY!!?

Baby those dried herbs need to sit in that jar with high proof alcohol for at LEAST a month!

That’s why before the use of calendars ppl use to prepare their tinctures either on the new moon or full moon. A a full moon cycle is usually 28 days or so. And they would give the moon names so it’s easier to remember when/what month said tincture was bottled.

This is also why herbal medicine is prepare in small batches. You have to take your time preparing your bottles. Making sure everything is clean so you don’t end up with mold. Diluting your grain alcohol. Heckkk knowing when to pick your herbs for max potency! Drying your herbs! That takes a lot of time too!

I didn’t mean to rant lol

No, this explains literally everything to me, thank you.

Spicy stuff has an unusually high ceiling, it seems like. Salty foods can only be as salty as salt. Even the sourest candy of all time poses basically no challenge to an adult palate. Spicy foods, though? They can be spicy enough to make you throw up and that’s not even approaching the spiciest food ever. A spicy food can kill you by being spicy

Sour absolutely has a high ceiling. It’s just caused by acidity, isn’t it? We could go all the way to “dangerously corrosive”, could we not?

One time, I ate so much sour candy in one sitting that my tongue started actually bleeding

I tasted hydrochloric acid in high school and it was so sour it left a visible burn on my tongue

you what now

you tasted fucking what now?

There's not really that much to explain.

Does that help?

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"

Re: blorbo from my research, here is my favorite ever case study. I'm obsessed with it.

Summary:

- Guy presents to neurology with muscle issues, very clearly has something going on but diagnostic tests are inconclusive

- History is mostly unremarkable. Key word, mostly. He drinks four liters of plain Earl Grey tea per day. For context this is nearly twice the recommended daily fluid intake. All fluids, to be clear, not just tea. He only drinks tea tho

- Bergamot is known to be phototoxic in high doses (reacts badly on your skin with sunlight)

- APPARENTLY nobody previously has consumed enough of it for it to be widely known that it is also, apparently, mildly toxic to ingest in high doses

- Guy starts drinking plain black tea again. Only 2 liters this time (he didn't have a medical reason to drink that much tea, he just liked it) and so now he's fully recovered

When the character makes selfish decisions fully knowing it's the wrong choice. and then it causes them and everyone else pain and disaster and ruins everything 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold, Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old, Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature's sweetness to all, Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall, Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea, Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.

Was inspired by the previous post a while back, and had been working on this on and off for a long while.

You can see the full-resolution versions on My Patreon.

I love all of these. The angel of the the deep's wings are canvas, held up by an anchor. The angel of war's wings are blades, and its shield is a coffin. The angel of solace is a mutant, its arms deforming into wings. Geiger counter in hand, it guides us through the danger only it knows. Was this angel once a man? Corrupted now beyond hope, he can at least save others from the same fate.

this shit is so incredibly cool that i cannot and refuse to attempt to properly articulate it

My favorite bit of folk medicine is that we’re supposed to take wormwood for intestinal parasites. It’s actually really effective, which is how wormwood got its name, but the reason it’s effective is that wormwood is literally just poison and it happens to kill the worms slightly faster than it kills you.

That’s medicine BABEYYYYYY!!!!

No, but seriously, the reason plants have useful chemicals that we can use medicinally is because they have evolved those chemicals as poisons to prevent predation. Humans were just smart enough to figure out through trial and error how to balance these chemical extracts to counteract abnormalities in our bodies.

Like: “Hm. This plant toxin is a cardiac glycoside and increases heart output. In a healthy person, this is highly unpleasant and may even cause death. But… for my aging aunt over here who’s suffering from congestive heart failure… a little foxglove extract taken every morning with her tea would probably help her circulation and keep her weary heart kickin’ for a few more years.”

Medicine is the opportune application of poisons. Healers and poisoners are folks with similar skill sets and wildly different philosophies.

@deathisforsissies

dear @shitpostsampler i would like a pony and a cross stitch pattern for “Healers and poisoners are folks with similar skill sets and wildly different philosophies” please <3

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

FB image credit: Ceres Science

i think that the "i do not control the ____" memes are generally tame and do not lend enough credence to the genuine absurdity of the original line that is

I saw this and remembered that I had this thread saved in a folder and figured this would be a good time to bring it out

READ THE WHOLE THING. I cannot garuntee that you will be pleased, but I can guarantee that it is one HELL of a rollercoaster.