The Light Of Twelve Stars by Supriyo Lahiri [Hardcover]

Even 150 years ago, one of the treatments for hysteria involved inserting a red-hot iron rod into a woman’s vagina. One of the treatments for diarrhoea was to pump warm salt water into the patient’s rectum. Doctors even used special devices to pump tobacco smoke into the rectum of people who were near death after drowning.

Forced sexual intercourse was once considered an accepted treatment for anaemia in women. Until relatively recently, attempts to relieve women’s labour pain were considered the work of the devil, and those who tried to do so could be punished by being accused of witchcraft and burned alive.

For epilepsy, patients were sometimes made to consume fungi growing on human skulls or drink the fresh blood of criminals who had just been executed. From dysentery to diabetes, the treatment for many illnesses involved bloodletting—cutting the veins in the arm to make the patient bleed—and purging, administering powerful laxatives to make the patient repeatedly empty their bowels.

In the million-year history of humankind, it is only through a few brilliant discoveries made over the last several hundred years that we have been rescued from this deep darkness in the world of medicine.

(The Light of Twelve Stars) tells the little-known stories behind twelve of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine.