Traumatic wounds were at significant risk of getting infected, and honey dressings were frequently used by the Romans. The military physician Pedanius Dioscorides wrote that “honey is cleansing, opens pores, and draws out fluids. Boiled and applied it heals flesh that stands separated”.

The Sushruta Samhita, a medical textbook written in Sanskrit in India in around 600 BC, contained detailed instructions for cataract surgery. The patient had to look at the tip of his or her nose while the surgeon, holding the eyelids apart with thumb and index finger, used a needle-like instrument to pierce the eyeball from the side. It was then sprinkled with breast milk and the outside of the eye bathed with a herbal medication. The surgeon used the instrument to scrape out the clouded lens until the eye “assumed the glossiness of a resplendent cloudless sun”. During recovery it was important for the patient to avoiding coughing, sneezing, burping or anything else that might cause pressure in the eye. If the operation were a success, the patient would regain some useful vision, albeit unfocused.

The Black Death of 1347–51 was unprecedented and decimated more than half the population in certain areas. Following another epidemic in the 1360s, there were recurrent plague outbreaks in England, France, Italy and elsewhere well into the 17th century.The bumpy skin and often poisonous nature of the toad meant it was often seen as an antidote to plague; dried specimens would be laid on plague buboes in an attempt to cure the disease  It was discussed by the likes of Paracelsus in the 16th century, and in the 17th century by Jan Baptist van Helmont in his Tumulus pestis, who dismissed its efficacy.

While it was believed magic could cause impotence in the medieval era, medicines were also thought to help alleviate the issue. A powder of vulture’s kidney and testicle, mixed with wine, was seen as a good cure for impotence. When people intended to have sex, they were also encouraged to make sure the conditions were right: they should eat rich foods (such as meat and eggs) and drink alcohol to increase desire, and heat the room by lighting a fire.

During the late 1500s, prunes were thought to work as both a preventative to, and a cure for, sexually transmitted diseases. The surgeon William Clowes recommended their use in the ‘Treatise on Lues Venerea’ included in his A Profitable and Necessarie Booke of Observations in 1596.Belief in the fruit’s power to stave off infection was so strongly held that it was commonly served in brothels.Thomas Lodge’s Wits Misery, and the World’s Madnesse (1596) suggests that a prostitute’s dwelling place might be identified by the sighting of “a dish of stewed prunes in the window, and two or three fleering wenche sit knitting or sewing in her shop”. 

A charm against fever, attributed to the 15th-century Florentine alchemist Bisticius, involved writing holy words on three sage leaves. The leaves should then, Bisticius advised, be “eaten on three days on a fasting stomach, one on each day”. As such, the patient was literally consuming the healing benefits of the words.

Cold bathing was introduced at Bethlem in the 1680s and became a way of ‘shocking’ inmates out of mental illness; it remained a popular course of treatment for much of the 18th century. Patients could be submerged in cold water for long periods of time, wrapped in towels that had been soaked in ice, or sprayed with cold water.

In the late 18th century and early 19th centuries, doctors believe that stomach ailments such as dyspepsia/indigestion were very “British” afflictions. According to The Dublin Penny Journal, these were exacerbated by the typical “English breakfast of tea, sugar, milk and bread”, which was “especially prone to undergo spontaneous fermentation” within the stomach. In order to be cured, sufferers were told to “rise from your down bed, leave your fire-side, walk, ride, inhale the sea-breeze, fly to the mountains – do this, and you may… eat toasted cheese like a Welshman”.

Spanish Flu swept across the globe at around the end of the First World War, and it’s estimated that between 25m and 100m died worldwide from it.It spread throughout Britain in 1918, and advice to ward against it was rampant – although not all of it was useful. One government official encouraged people to “clean [their] teeth regularly”, while the News of the World suggested readers “eat plenty of porridge”. Dr Robertson Dobie of Perthshire noted that hardly any of his flu patients worked at the local jam factory – where they lived in a sugary atmosphere all day – and prescribed jam and sweets. “In two months,” he predicted, influenza “will be a thing of the past.”