A Brief Compendium of Medical Quackery

Humanity has always searched for a magic pill to relieve pain and illness, and many folks have taken advantage of that desire to make lots of money. During the golden age of quackery, there were cure-alls for everything from flat feet to cancer, most of which did little besides make you feel like you were doing something. Among the most curious were cigarettes fo asthma. Really.

Well, it’s actually not as crazy as it sounds. Here us out: smoking to relieve what we now understand as “Asthma” is a practice that can be traced back thousands of years, when Ayurevedic medicine called for the smoking of a plant with atropine, Atropa belladonna, to heal throat and chest ailments. “The ancient Greeks,” says Gerald C. Smaldone in Drug Delivery to the Lung, even “sent consumptive patients to the pine forests of Libya to benefit from volatile gases released there.” Air was for inhaling – and infusing – to heal. For the most part, the asthmatic cigarettes that arose in the early 19th century, and declined in the 1950s, didn’t include tobacco.

But they did contain a cocktail of herbs and narcotics that almost always included atropine, which diluted the airways of the lungs to temporarily relieve symptoms, while simultaneously rendering the smoker lightheaded, nausious, hallucinegic, and a victim to a rapid heart-rate increase. Regardless, Potter’s Asthma Cigarettes, Himrod’s Cure for Asthma, Dr. Kellogg’s Asthma Remedy – you name it – soared in popularity…

Narcotics played a big role in such cures before they were regulated. Regulations also went after the poisons in these medicines. Read about snake oil, cocaine wine, radium cream, arsenic wafers, orthopedic high heels, and more at Messy Nessy Chic.