Original subtitles

Did you know there was a time when an electric jolt

was the way to cure impotence?

The current is supposed to send energy

to the seminal glands, fire 'em up, and get 'em going.

Or when doctors would replace your skin with an animal's?

Sheep, dogs, rabbits, chickens,

as long as it's got skin,

it's fair game for doctors to use.

Or that coffee used to go up the other end?

He has a thriving practice on Park Avenue.

People are lining up for his coffee enemas.

Why coffee?

These are the things we used to do,

for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom,

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous? Certainly.

Deadly? Occasionally.

But, boy, wasn't it exciting?

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

Well, the need to find a safe, effective painkiller

was a big motivator for 19th century doctors.

And what they came up with

is a name you're sure to recognize.

After the Civil War, a lot of injured soldiers

are given a painkiller called morphine.

And not surprisingly, many of them become addicted to it.

At the end of the 1800s, chemists around the world

are trying to make a synthetic version of morphine

that isn't as addictive.

There are two chemists in Europe who find a way to do it,

C.R. Wright in England

and, later, Felix Hoffmann in Germany.

Because Wright discovers the formula first,

Hoffman can't get a patent.

For most chemists, this would be a deal breaker,

but not for Felix Hoffmann.

Hoffman works for a large pharmaceutical company

that's willing to take a risk.

In 1897, instead of applying for a patent,

they trademark their synthetic morphine.

A trademark doesn't protect the invention.

It protects the name so no one can copy it.

They call it heroin.

Now I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, they don't mean like heroin heroin.

It's just, like, called heroin.

No, no, it's called heroin because it is heroin heroin.

They're selling it as Heroin with a capital H,

like a brand name,

to make the appeal of the product greater.

This new wonder drug goes into mass production

and is exported around the world,

including, of course, to the United States.

It's advertised as safe and not habit-forming.

You could walk into a pharmacy and say,

"Give me a bottle of Heroin,"

and the pharmacist would be like,

"Yes, I just got a new shipment of heroin in yesterday."

And then they would just sell it to you.

Heroin comes out at a perfect time.

Not only is it an effective painkiller,

it is also great for something else.

At the turn of the century,

there's a massive global outbreak of tuberculosis,

a bacterial infection that affects the lungs

and causes a nasty cough.

And it's particularly rough in the US.

And what does capital H Heroin do?

It soothes a cough.

So in the early 1900s,

they're selling heroin as a cough syrup.

Presumably, your cough would go away

or you would still have it and just not notice or care.

So heroin, like the codeine in our cough suppressants,

is an opiate and it makes you sleepy,

so it could work for a cough.

But it would not be my first choice.

Look at the charming little label.

Compressed tablets containing 24 grains each

of heroin hydrochloride.

Directions, take two or three tablets.

I mean that is, it's totally legit.

What could go wrong?

Heroin is touted as this great solution

to the morphine addiction problem.

And there's an organization in Boston

that gives free heroin to morphine addicts,

hoping that it will help them break the habit.

The solution to help people with a morphine addiction

is heroin.

The results are disastrous.

What they end up doing is just creating deeper addiction.

Unintended, but that's the consequence.

Patients end up needing higher and higher doses

to get the same fix.

And it's basically completely backfiring.

Within about a decade of heroin entering the US,

it's being used as a recreational drug.

And by 1914, addicts are knocking on hospital doors

desperately searching for treatment.

Things get so bad

that the original company that makes heroin

voluntarily takes it off the market.

But that doesn't stop other illicit and generic versions

from being available in the marketplace.

The gang dilutes the heroin,

packages it for sale to drug addicts all over the country.

Doctors and chemists are realizing

that heroin is not a great solution,

that maybe even heroin is more addictive than morphine.

In an effort to curb both its legal and illegal use,

Congress passes the Heroin Act of 1924.

This makes the manufacturer, importation,

and possession of heroin illegal in the United States,

even for medical use.

The brand name Heroin

was derived from a German word which means heroic.

And though heroin turned out to be less than heroic,

in the late 1800s, there was a new hero on the scene,

electricity.

And at the time, it was innovative, exciting,

and people were figuring out all sorts of interesting things

they could do with it.

It's the 19th century and all things electricity

are fascinating the public.

Edison is going full steam with wiring cities like New York

and creating power plants and the light bulb.

And electricity becomes a panacea, a cure-all.

There's this fascination between electricity

and its possible health benefits.

If it can power our fledgling industrial world,

what if it could power the body?

Soon, people are creating electrical devices

for all sorts of ailments,

up to and including erectile dysfunction.

At the turn of the century, impotence was a big mystery.

They didn't know what caused it.

They thought maybe if we could stimulate

more sperm in your system some way,

we could get you revitalized again.

There's no doubt in my mind that impotence

is probably one of the worst things

that could happen to a dude.

If I found myself in a situation

where I was literally impotent,

I would go to any lengths to cure that.

In the 1890s, one solution is an electric belt.

Advertisements for these electrical belts

claim that they can cure all sorts of ailments,

back aches, kidney pain.

And they also coyly allude to the fact

that the electrical belt might be able to help weak men.

And we all know what that's code for.

The way it's supposed to work is the battery-powered belt

has electrodes that are connected directly to the organ.

And these electrodes are to deliver

a, quote, "soothing current

to the delicate nerves and fibers."

And they claim that the current is supposed to send energy

to the seminal glands,

fire 'em up, and get 'em going.

These electrical belts

are the height of sophistication of the time.

Pretty soon, there's plenty of options to choose from.

So fierce is the competition that there emerges

a so-called battle of the belts.

Manufacturers run ad campaigns starring leading actors,

well-known doctors, and they all claim

that this belt generates, quote, "a health-giving current

to the whole system."

The thing basically looks and is a torture device,

but clearly, the testimonials work

because between the 1890s and 1920,

they sell thousands of these things.

And they're usually bought through catalogs

like the ones from Sears.

But these belts

aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Metals that these electrodes are composed of

leave behind a corrosive salt that tends to burn the skin.

So now, not only are these men impotent,

they're covered in sores and are in pain.

The electric belts remain in vogue for a very short time.

By 1910, the American Medical Association

deems it a quackery

and they are pretty much removed from the market.

Electrification turned out not to be the ideal solution,

but it was far from the only extreme remedy

to hit the market.

For many, being a red-blooded American male

has always meant displaying confidence, vigor,

and a certain ability to perform.

Well, if you're having trouble in that area,

in 1918, all that stood between these problems

and a whole new you was a highly promising new surgery.

In the 1800s, when people think of impotence,

they think of it as a depletion of sperm.

Therefore, doctors will prescribe to not masturbate

as that is a waste of your sperm

and could yield more impotence.

Furthermore, doctors will prescribe

so-called cures like opium, or bleeding, or quinine.

A doctor named John Brinkley

comes up with a more permanent solution.

Imagine you have a problem, and you go to the doctor,

and the doctor says, "I can help you,

and the way I am gonna do that

is by slicing open your scrotum and putting,

like, little nut-sized goat testicles inside of you.

John Brinkley,

who's supposed to be this super sophisticated doctor

with this super star degree,

he has this procedure to sew a goat's testicle

into a man's scrotum.

Brinkley assures his willing patient

that the goat's sex gland will naturally bond

with his organs and his blood vessels

and become a functioning part of his body.

And so he gains a big, big following.

People beat a path to his door for this procedure.

There is such a demand for Dr. Brinkley's services

that he branches out.

He thinks what's good for the goose

must be good for the gander,

so he comes up with the brilliant idea

of transplanting goat ovaries into female patients

to help them deal with their pregnancy issues.

People were so desperate to fix these problems,

Brinkley was charging people $750 a procedure,

which is $12,000 in today's money.

Despite the price,

thousands are flocking to his clinic for a cure,

and it raises suspicion at the American Medical Association.

Morris Fishbein, the editor

of the Journal of the American Medical Association,

soon wages a personal and medical crusade

against Dr. Brinkley as a fraud.

It turns out that, quote, "Dr. John Brinkley"

isn't even a real doctor.

His degree is from a sham university.

Goat transplants are bad enough,

but dude isn't even a trained surgeon.

He's just out here wilding,

slicing through scrotums, ruining people's lives.

Any success stories reported by Dr. Brinkley's patients

is likely due to the placebo effect.

It's basically a mind trick.

They were not really cured,

but they led themselves to believe

that they had been cured.

Think about it.

Who's gonna come forward in the 1920s, or even today,

and say that their goat testicle implants

designed to treat impotency didn't work

and so now they want a refund?

No one.

By 1930, Brinkley's medical license was revoked

and he was forced to reimburse millions of dollars

to patients he defrauded.

Most people trusted their doctor's advice

when they were told they needed surgery

or to take a prescription.

So who would question their doctor

when they recommended the newest medical remedy,

a nice, smooth cigarette?

You just have to remember that the past

can sometimes be a foreign land.

And in the 1950s, half of all Americans smoked.

Cigarettes were everywhere.

You get on a plane, there was a smoking section.

In class, in college, you could smoke.

You would walk into a hospital

and there'd be ashtrays in the waiting room.

In the hospital rooms,

there'd be an ashtray next to the bed.

Like, there was cigarette smoking literally everywhere.

There were even vending machines for cigarettes.

Kids today, they can't even imagine.

These days, the message on smoking is clear.

It's bad for you.

But back in the day, the message was very different.

Tobacco ads start ramping up in the 1800s,

but their content is unlike anything we'd see today.

Do you suffer from asthma?

Have you tried Cigares de Joy?

Have a head cold, hay fever,

or all diseases of the throat?

Give a try to Marshall's Cigarettes.

In the 1800s, it's believed that asthma

and respiratory problems stem from a buildup of phlegm.

So what better way to cure it than to smoke tobacco

mixed with herbs?

I mean, think about it, you're inhaling the cure

right into your lungs.

Early cigarette ads lean into these ideas.

Tobacco is a remedy.

To show just how harmless tobacco is,

the promotions around Joy's Cigarettes

say that they're suitable for women and children.

Imagine giving a 10-year-old a cigarette

for an asthma attack.

It's so deeply counterintuitive

to today's sensibilities, it's just bonkers.

But tobacco companies have done some homework

when it comes to health claims, in their own unique way.

In the late 1920s, the American Tobacco Company,

the manufacturer of the famed Lucky Strike cigarettes,

hire an ad agency who mails cartons of cigarettes

to thousands and thousands of doctors,

with an attached survey

asking whether Lucky Strike cigarettes

are less irritating to sensitive and tender throats

than other brands of cigarettes.

You're getting a free carton of smokes,

you know, you're more inclined to say,

"Sure, I'd recommend them."

They get back about 21,000 of these surveys

where doctors say, "Yes, we recommend Lucky Strikes."

And they use that as a marketing and advertising campaign.

Absolutely ingenious.

Incredibly unethical, but absolutely genius.

American tobacco's campaign is so successful

it spurs an advertising war.

Camel decides to take a page

out of their competitors' playbook

and starts sending cartons of cigarettes

to loads upon loads of doctors,

and then they release a bold ad campaign that says,

"More doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette."

True or not, it didn't matter.

At this time, the advertising industry

is completely unregulated,

so companies were free to make any claim they wanted.

Did you say I'll feel better smoking Philip Morris?

Yes, you'll feel better.

In major cities across the country,

tobacco execs are setting up hospitality booths

at medical conventions.

And they are passing out free cartons of cigarettes

to the doctors there.

And these doctors, they're lining up to get them.

The R. J. Reynolds Company

sets up a medical relations division.

This is a tobacco company

with a medical relations division.

Their aim is pretty simple.

They wanna get doctors

to recommend smoking to their patients.

And the craziest thing is that it works.

By 1953, more than half of America's

physicians are smokers.

And they are encouraging their patients

to become smokers too.

Just imagine you go to your doctor,

and he's taking a pull of a cigarette,

and he's advising you that you should smoke yourself

to calm your nerves.

And not only are they just recommending this

to regular people,

they're also recommending this to pregnant women.

Obviously now we know that smoking during pregnancy

is an absolute no-no.

But in the 1940s and the 1950s,

doctors are actually encouraging women to smoke

as a means of calming their nerves

and keeping the weight off.

The recommendation is relatively short-lived.

In 1964, the surgeon general issues a warning

laying out all the dangers of smoking.

The medical profession at large

really takes a measure of how dangerous

and how unhealthy smoking can be.

The government didn't just go after cigarettes.

In 1971, they also came for the advertising industry,

banning cigarette commercials

on television and radio to this day.

According to Mary Poppins,

a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

But back in the day, some doctors believed

that for medicine to be effective, it needed to go up.

People have a very different understanding

of gastric health in the 21st century

than they have in centuries gone by,

especially the way people viewed

the excretory parts of the body.

In the 1920s, the colon has a really bad rap.

It's considered dirty, it's never cleaned,

it's like the sewer of the human body.

The common belief of doctors at this time

was essentially that all of the contaminants in the colon

could eventually pass into the bloodstream

and cause catastrophic illness throughout the body.

Physicians are administering enemas

for all sorts of ailments,

headaches, indigestion, heart palpitations.

And Americans are buying it.

The 1920s and '30s are known as the golden age of purgation.

To get the maximum purging effect,

doctors start adding ingredients to their enema treatments.

Max Gerson is a German doctor

who experiments with all kinds of nutritional interventions

to treat his own headache.

And he starts to think about the fact

that caffeine constricts blood vessels.

So what does he do?

He adds coffee to an enema.

If I was gonna pick something to use as an enema,

why coffee?

Gerson's belief is that the coffee

triggers sort of a domino theory of detoxification.

The coffee enema stimulates the liver,

which then produces more bile.

The bile then helps flush more toxins

through the gallbladder, through the small intestine,

through the large intestine, and then out the body.

Gerson not only says that this coffee enema

could cure migraines and indigestion,

he also claims that it could cure tuberculosis and cancer.

Strangely enough, coffee enemas

seem to be a magic cure-all that people can't get enough of.

He has a thriving practice on Park Avenue.

He's on the staff at Gotham Hospital in New York City.

He's even backed by the Robinson Foundation

for cancer research.

People are practically lining up for his coffee enemas.

The only catch is that there's no evidence

that this actually works.

The National Cancer Institute

decides to investigate 10 of Dr. Gerson's cases,

and they find no evidence

of any efficacy of his cures for cancer.

It's basically determined

that Gerson is completely full of it.

Not only are coffee enemas particularly ineffective,

they're unbelievably dangerous.

They can cause damage to the rectum, the colon,

they can cause nerve damage,

and they can cause terrible burns if the coffee is hot,

which is kind of, like, obvious.

Despite Dr. Gerson's claims,

people determined they'd rather have their coffee in a cup.

That doesn't mean that beverages were off the table

for medical purposes.

Take a pair of Canadian doctors

who were desperate to fight cholera in the 1850s.

Cholera is a really destructive,

incredibly debilitating intestinal sickness.

It causes agonizing cramping, massive dehydration,

and terrible diarrhea.

And it's so severe

a person can die within hours of contracting it.

In 1854,

Toronto doctors James Bovell and Edward Hodder

are desperately searching for a cure.

White blood cells had been discovered

about a decade earlier in Europe,

and Dr. Bovell was investigating their effects on disease.

Dr. Hodder comes up with the idea

that maybe he could cure cholera patients

with blood transfusions.

But Bovell was sort of like, "Dude, it's a pandemic.

What if the people are actually sick

and this blood is no good?"

Dr. Hodder starts wondering

if there's some sort of substitute they can use.

And because Dr. Hodder was only as advanced as the 1850s,

he decides that the liquid to use for blood transfusions

is milk.

They have a very specific reason

why they think their idea will work.

It sounds crazy right now, but it's the 1850s,

and they're sort of like, "Milk is white,

white blood cells are white, it's the same."

The doctors need a human subject.

And in the middle of a cholera outbreak,

desperate patients are eager for any solution.

A farmer turns up at the hospital

extremely sick with cholera

and willing to let them do the first milk transfusion.

They take this guy

into this shack that they were using for smallpox

and then they get a cow, like, in the room.

These doctors collect the milk

and they inject it into the man's veins.

Now, at first, nothing happens.

So they give him more milk, and more milk.

Ultimately, they give him 12 ounces of milk intravenously.

And miraculously, his symptoms start reversing.

His color comes back to his face,

his pulse returns to normal.

This is working.

They repeat this procedure the following day with a woman

and see the same sort of recovery.

Milk transfusions seem like the safe

and effective treatment people have been hoping for.

There's so much excitement about this process.

And they try it on five more patients

who all end up totally dying.

It didn't work.

But because there have been some successes,

milk transfusions become fairly popular

in terms of treating cholera.

They also become a popular way to treat tuberculosis

and other infections.

The lucky ones complain about new ailments,

like chest pain and headaches.

The other ones not so lucky,

they enter into a coma and not wake up.

But to be fair, back in the day,

transfusions are still a little bit of high science

and there's still a lot more to learn about them.

Half a century later,

when doctors finally understood blood types,

a doctor from Ohio created the transfusion methods

that surgeons rely on today.

The late 20th century was notorious

for bizarre weight loss fads, peaking in the 1980s.

But for one weight loss product,

the story started a few decades earlier.

In the 1920s, there was a whole diet culture

that existed then, and it was almost exclusively

about diet restriction, and they called it reducing.

Doctors are advising their patients

to reduce their size through diet and exercise.

But it's kind of a crappy time to have to be counting calories

because this is when the American food landscape

has just unleashed PEZ candies, and the Charleston Chew,

the Baby Ruth, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

So there's a real desire for a silver bullet.

Can I just take a pill or a shot that'll make me lose weight?

So in 1941, the Carlay Company

comes out with the most amazing product ever,

Carlay's reducing candy.

It's called reducing candy

because it helps you reduce your size, right?

It helps you lose weight.

It comes in multiple flavors.

There's peanut butter, butterscotch, chocolate,

chocolate mint, and caramel.

And it's like a fudge consistency.

So the idea is it's not so much a magic pill

but a yummy treat that you can enjoy.

So how does this reducing candy work?

Carlay's secret ingredient is called benzocaine.

And if that sounds familiar,

it's because it's the active ingredient

in products like Orajel.

Benzocaine causes numbing.

And if you were to put this stuff in your mouth

and on your lips, it would cause numbness.

The thinking is if you eat a reducing candy before meals,

it will numb your taste buds.

And because you can't taste much of anything,

you're gonna eat less.

So as they start to market this product,

they do what a lot of companies do, they go to celebrities.

So it's Hedy Lamarr and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

And they just seem to be leading the perfect life.

They can have this yummy candy and look fabulous.

Sales of Carlay's reducing candy keep growing.

And by the early 1980s, Carlay is one of the top sellers

in the $10 billion a year diet industry.

But they're about to hit a major snag.

Shakespeare once said, "What's in a name?"

The truth is that a name means a lot.

Carlay's product had a name

that had worked amazingly for 40 years,

until it didn't anymore.

Why not try Ayds?

Delicious tasting Ayds candy.

Ayds helps you stay the way you wanna be.

Fate throws them a pretty big curve ball.

Carlay's reducing candy has been sold

under the same brand name since the 1940s.

Before reducing, see your doctor,

then get Ayds.

Ayds, A-Y-D-S.

I kid you not.

Can you imagine an arthritis cream called cancer?

Oh, it's my new chocolate bar. I call it Covid.

No one's gonna buy it.

Now here we are in the 1980s.

Ayds means something really different.

As the AIDS epidemic grows, people's fears increase,

and sales of Ayds, the diet candy, start to plummet.

The company's CEO

lobbies to have the name of the disease changed.

When that doesn't work,

he spends a quarter of a million dollars

to rebrand as Diet Ayds.

It doesn't work either.

Ayds Reducing Candy finally stopped production in 1985,

probably for the best.

If only candy could numb you during surgery

in the early 1900s.

To finally stop the pain on the operating table,

they had to turn to something far different.

For centuries, the very idea of an operation

is enough to strike fear into the hearts of patients.

I watch Civil War movies,

and there's always some guy with a belt in his mouth

or biting on a bullet,

while some sawbones is just going to town,

cutting off that leg and tossing it onto a pile of legs.

It isn't until the late 19th century

that doctors find ways to relieve pain during operations.

The first successful surgery with anesthesia

is performed in 1846 when a Bostonian dentist

uses a gas called ether to sedate a patient.

The following year, an obstetrician in Scotland

ended up using chloroform

on a patient experiencing labor pains.

In 1863, a New York professor popularizes nitrous oxide.

The problem with all of these though

is they're all general anesthesia.

You're completely knocked out,

and you're walking a really fine line

between life and death if you administer the wrong dosage.

Doctors are on the lookout

for something a little more localized

and a little less fatal.

And Dr. Karl Koller from Austria has just the thing,

cocaine.

Koller understands the numbing effects of cocaine

and decides to use it in surgery.

The particular thing about Dr. Koller

is that he's an ophthalmologist.

He's injecting cocaine into people's eyeballs.

Today that kind of sounds insane,

but at the time it's revolutionary.

By injecting cocaine directly in the eye,

he can stabilize a patient enough to operate in a place

where no one could ever operate before.

So William Halsted,

an American doctor, hears about this

and says, "Oh, well, if it works with the eye,

maybe it works with other parts of the body."

Halsted starts experimenting on himself

and then invites colleagues to join him.

Pretty soon, they're all injecting

their peripheral nerves

to see if other parts of the body will go numb,

not just their eye.

And they realize, wow, this works, right?

This solves a major problem.

So they start using cocaine as an anesthesia.

Dr. Holsted

thinks he found the holy grail of anesthesiology,

except for one little detail.

Halsted and his colleagues

become completely addicted to cocaine.

Two of his colleagues die within months.

Halsted himself spends the rest of his life

in and out of recovery.

Despite the wealth of information

that he garners from his investigations,

he only publishes one paper,

who's rambling incoherence probably suggests

that Halsted was high at the time of writing.

In 1914, the government makes cocaine

an illegal substance.

But you still have to credit Dr. Halsted.

The modern medical field would not be where it is

and what it is without him.

The good doctor's risk-taking

led to huge advancements in local anesthesia.

Who doesn't love the sound of a cooing baby

or a giggling one when you tickle their feet?

Well, back in the 19th century,

when those cute sounds turned to cries,

where did exhausted parents

turn to soothe their unhappy children?

In the 1800s, traditional medicine

in the way we have it now, didn't exist.

There weren't these big pharmaceutical companies.

So they had a thing called patent medicine.

Patent medicine is basically the precursor

to over the counter drugs,

and they promise to cure everything.

And I do mean everything, colds, headaches, heartburn,

warts, baldness, even tuberculosis and cancer.

If patent medicine is on the label,

people have a sense of security about what they're buying.

The problem is there's no guarantee

that the maker has any idea

about the ingredients they're using.

It's basically like the Wild West of pharmaceuticals.

Anyone can concoct sort of anything

and claim that it's medicine.

Enter Charlotte Winslow

and her son-in-law Jeremiah Curtis.

In 1845, they patent a miracle cure

specifically designed for teething babies.

They call it Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup.

So Jeremiah Curtis runs a pharmacy.

And he takes Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup

and starts selling it out to the public.

Part of what makes patent medicine work is testimonials,

both word of mouth and in advertising.

And Jeremiah Curtis really leans into this.

Jeremiah Curtis places ads

in thousands of newspapers across the country.

The ads are testimonials,

mothers telling Mrs. Winslow her cure is a miracle.

Not only does he get testimonials from mothers,

he even gets testimonials from reverends.

Who's gonna go against the word of a reverend?

Sales of Mrs. Winslow's

Soothing Syrup take off,

and not just because Curtis is a marketing genius.

Unlike most patent medicines, this one actually works.

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup claims to soothe children,

soften the gums, cure colic,

and be the best cure for diarrhea.

What magical ingredient could it possibly have

that could cure all these ails?

Well, that ingredient turned out to be morphine.

And it's not a different kind of morphine.

It's the morphine you know about,

the kind they give to, like, people on the battlefield

who've gotten gunshots, grown adults.

Because it has morphine in it,

it really does offer medical relief.

What it lacks is something different,

which is a warning label about its side effects.

Morphine is an incredibly powerful painkiller

that's derived from opium.

Morphine has several side effects.

Morphine causes constipation.

There's also extreme addiction, drowsiness,

respiratory depression, vomiting.

Mrs. Winslow makes bank on this soothing syrup.

She is basically selling 1.5 million bottles annually

for decades.

She is creating a lot

of junkie babies.

Mrs. Winslow's dosage recommendations

was around six droplets for newborns,

a half teaspoon for babies up to six months old,

and a full teaspoon for babies over six months.

And these are to be administered three to four times a day.

So let's just think about this for a second.

Like, today, a hospital would give an adult patient

two to four milligrams of morphine to manage extreme pain.

These babies are sleeping through the night

because they're getting up to 40 milligrams

of morphine a day.

That's a massive quantity,

even by illicit drug trafficking standards.

On the black market, morphine might be sold

in 30 milligram tablets.

This is before you have the AMA.

This is before doctors are a profession.

So you don't have this sort of pushback

from a medical establishment, which allows for a product

like Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup

to explode in the marketplace.

Millions of people

are buying Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup.

They just want their kid to sleep through the night.

This syrup is given to infants

that are already in a bad way.

They may be sick, they may be teething,

which gives them a fever.

So it takes decades before doctors figure out

that Mrs. Winslow's is doing more harm than good.

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup

wasn't banned until the 1930s,

making it one of the longest selling teething remedies

in US history.

The human body is resilient,

but sometimes it needs a little help to heal.

And once upon a time, doctors were a little more carefree

in looking for cures in unusual places.

In the 19th century,

getting injured was an unfortunate part of life,

farming accidents, industrial accidents, fires.

People had short, nasty, and brutish lives.

Today, if part of you unfortunately goes missing

or is disfigured by an injury, an accident, or a burn,

one of the first things doctors will turn to

are skin grafts, taking healthy skin

from a different part of your body,

attaching it, its blood supplies, nerve endings,

to the injured part of the body, covering it up,

letting it heal, and your life can go on.

Unfortunately, in the 1800s, the risk of infection is high

because antibiotics don't exist yet.

Another problem is the lack of an anesthetic.

The pain will often send the body into shock

and makes it even that much more likely

that the patient will reject the skin graft.

When grafts

from the patient's own removed skin fail,

doctors start experimenting with new procedures.

They come up with something called a pedicled skin graft.

Where essentially the healthy skin

from one part of the body

was still mostly attached to that part of the body

and stretched to the affected part of the body.

Doctors believed that just like the roots

of a transplanted tree will grow into the ground,

blood vessels of the transplanted skin

will grow into the wound.

There are photos of people who had lost a nose to syphilis

or had a facial injury

with their nose stitched to their arm.

While this technique sounds promising,

not many people signed up to be skinned,

especially without some heavy-duty anesthesia.

So doctors figure they'll just try the next best thing,

and that is animal donors.

Sheep, dogs, rabbits, chickens.

They don't care if it's got fur, if it's got feathers.

As long as it's got skin, it's fair game for doctors to use.

And they're thinking, if it's a live animal,

there's a greater chance that this might work.

Basically, they wanna get a live animal,

peel their skin off,

and attach it to the wound of the person.

This atmosphere is rampant with bacteria and hazards.

How does the animal go to the bathroom?

How do you maintain the animal's immobility

so that the graft can take?

It is not a surprise

that there are no reported successful cases

of this type of skin graft ever taking place.

By the 1880s, several surgeons are experimenting with

a different type of procedure called a free skin graft.

The free skin graft does not involve attaching oneself

to an immobile animal.

It involves removing the skin from the animal

and then attaching it to the patient.

Free skin grafts are rabbit skin,

but doctors realize very quickly that frog skin is better.

Not only does it seem to adapt really well to a human host,

they don't have to deal with fur.

There are reports of doctors going to the local pond,

capturing, decapitating, and skinning frogs,

throwing the skin in their pocket,

and reporting to the hospital.

Honestly, you have to imagine you were a patient back then

and you're relying on a doctor.

He's going out to get a frog

and he's gonna put it in his pocket

and bring it back to you to sew on to you.

That sounds safe.

It sounds to me like something out of a horror movie.

"Human Centipede".

Doctors have to constantly reassure their patients

that the green pigment

will eventually turn the proper color.

The reason why there is no green pigment

in the frog skin that is grafted to human beings,

it's not because the pigment dissipates, or fades,

or assimilates with human pigment.

No, there's no pigment because the skin cells die.

Despite performing hundreds of grafts from animal donors,

not one of them works.

As it turns out, the skin is the body's biggest organ.

And much like in a heart transplant,

the recipient and the donor of a skin graft must be a match.

So the thought that a frog was gonna work

was a bit ridiculous looking back.

In the search for remedies,

whether it was coffee enemas, or milk transfusions,

or over the counter heroin,

there was a fine line between recklessness and genius.

But maybe all of that trial and error

is what led to life-saving breakthroughs

and made our hazardous history worth examining.