Apparently, Beer Used To Be Considered A Legitimate Form Of Medicine

For anyone who’s even remotely familiar with history, it’s no secret that life was very different during the Victorian Era. Most of our coverage of the period here on ViralNova focuses on Victorian death rituals, but let’s take a different approach today.

Instead of keeping things morbid, we’re going to talk about something that almost everyone can get behind: beer.

Believe it or not, Victorians used beer for medicinal reasons. Beginning in the late 1800s, bartenders sometimes doubled as pseudo-physicians.

One of the most common medicinal beverages was known as “malt extract,” which was a mixture of hops and malt with an unusually high alcohol content. It was so alcoholic, in fact, that it easily made people forget about their troubles.

These so-called “therapeutic beers” promised to cure everything from gonorrhea to insomnia. Oddly enough, they were also prescribed for hangovers.

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While name-brand breweries got in on the action by producing their own medicinal tonics, many smaller operations sprung up all over the country. One of the most notable was the Liebmann Breweries franchise.

While all of those tonics felt good going down, they certainly never cured anything. In fact, there’s a good chance that they just made people feel worse in the long run.

(via The Pandora Society)

Ah, the Victorian Era. It truly must have been a paradise for those dealing with alcoholism.

Read more: http://www.viralnova.com/victorian-beer/

A Dentist Once Wrote About A Condition That Caused People’s Teeth To Explode

We often associate sitting in the dentist’s chair with annoyance and pain, but dentists never get enough credit for making that experience much less painful than it actually could be.

Thomas Morris, a writer and avid researcher of medical history oddities, wrote a piece about the history of dental explosions that’ll make your skin crawl. (Yes, seriously.)

In the 19th century, a dentist by the name of W.H. Atkinson wrote about a bizarre condition that caused people’s teeth to explode in their mouths. (And you thought getting cavities filled was painful!)

In 1817, Atkinson recorded the case of a reverend in Springfield, Pennsylvania, who suffered from a painful toothache.

One morning, he heard a loud crack in his mouth that sounded “like a pistol shot.” After his tooth shattered into tiny pieces, the pain went away.

In 1871, a young woman’s tooth blew up from a similar affliction.

Some say the sound that came from her mouth was so loud that she went deaf for a few days after the fact.

No one is quite sure if this condition actually existed, but one of its causes could have been that severe tooth decay often leads to gas buildup at the root.

When the tooth is filled with too much gas, it explodes like a balloon.

Another theory is that two different metals used for fillings back then reacted to each other by producing hydrogen.

That could explain the bizarre explosions.

(via Thomas Morris on BBC | Unexplained Mysteries)

But these are only theories, of course. Most modern dentists have little faith that this syndrome was ever actually a thing. Did Atkinson really treat a man with an exploding tooth problem, or was this just part of a sophisticated ploy to get his patients to floss more? We may never know.

To read more about the weird history of medicine, follow Thomas Morris on Twitter.

Read more: http://www.viralnova.com/exploding-teeth/