Animals were doing it long before humans even existed. Some birds will “bathe” in an ant nest because the formic acid excreted by the ants rids them of parasites. There’s even a word for it - zoopharmacognosy.
Long before recorded history, people knew what plants were helpful to treat or cure various maladies. Who knows what possessed the first human to chew on willow bark to relieve pain or reduce a fever? The earliest documentation of it was 400 BCE by Hippocrates, but it was probably common knowledge for much longer than that. The Chinese have been using various herbs to treat disease for at least 3000 years.
Humans have been using amputation for over 30,000 years.
There was the cowpox vaccine in 1798
and I suppose we have had effective pain-control (opium) for a very long time
- Anyway, the cowpox vaccine was an improvement on smallpox variolation, which was known to the Chinese at least by 1549.
Chimpanzees are known to put special plants on wounds to heal them better, so my guess is that other animals do it also to some degree. Cows eating special plants for their stomach, chickens eating small rocks and sand, hell even dogs and cats eating some plants to fix their stomach.
“Fix”. If I’m 10 minutes late with my dog’s breakfast he decides he needs to eat half my lawn.
20 minutes later and you do not have to mow.
That’s clever, but I’d rather mow than mop.
We have evidence of trepanning (drilling holes in the skull) going back to the flint tools time period. We still use this today to release pressure after a bleed in the skull.
It was a lot more brutal and had a much lower success rate back then. But the fact that we find so many skulls with evidence of trepanning means that prehistoric humans must have considered the low success rate worth the risk. What’s interesting is there’s no way they actually knew what trepanning could help with, since it’s to do with intracranial pressure. So in the same way the medieval cure for everything was bleeding, whether or not the disease had anything to do with blood, trepanning seems to have been the proverbial hammer for which everything looks like a nail.
Something I read in an off hand comment was that some people believed it got evil spirits out
This information assuming I’m remembering correctly is mostly educated speculation so don’t quote me on this
Head injuries would have been common, bleeding on the brain was probably easily recognisible in warriors for which it would help. How they discovered that it helps… nice
i can’t imagine that increased intracranial pressure feels good. maybe one guy was like ‘my head feels like it’s gonna explode’, and some other guy was like, ‘i’ve got an idea’. or maybe someone happened to get just the right kind of second head injury shortly after their first head injury that somehow made them get better. it’s a lot of unrecorded things happening back then. if only they had invented writing and wrote it down.
Limeys figured out scurvy around 1600
The British then forgot why they gave everyone citrus, screwed it up and started getting scurvy again.
