[HN Gopher] Medicine containers used in the golden age of piracy
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Medicine containers used in the golden age of piracy
Author : blumpy22
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-07-16 22:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.piratesurgeon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.piratesurgeon.com)
| moffkalast wrote:
| > For liquid medicines, a through and through dense container of
| (substance) silver, glass or horn is manufactured
|
| The horn option does not seem sanitary.
| asdff wrote:
| Horns are boiled as they are processed so it wouldn't be any
| different than any other container in that sense by the end, no
| random bovine microbes or whatever.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "first century Greek physician Pedanis Dioscorides says"
|
| You might have missed the year. This bit was a advice from 2000
| years ago, where horn was probably way more cheaper, than glas
| or metal. And I think if it is polished, it might be not too
| bad, but glas or silver are of course way better.
| mynameishere wrote:
| So, did they have any drugs that actually worked besides laudanum
| and "bark"? My reading of Jack Aubrey books suggests that
| medicine then was mostly about trauma care and bedside manner.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Anglo-Saxon eye potion helps fight against superbug
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/medieval-eye-potion
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Plants, mushrooms and animals have contained active substances
| forever, it would be surprising that after millenniums of
| trials and errors, the people of this time didn't settle on a
| few things that worked.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Sure, but are there examples besides aspirin and opiates?
| Unsurprisingly those are pain medications, since it was
| immediately obvious that they work.
|
| The other class of drug that would obviously be recognized as
| effective are psychoactives such as alcohol, caffeine, and
| nicotine.
|
| By contrast I can't imagine how they could judge the efficacy
| of e.g. blood pressure medications back in those days, even
| though there are purely herbal treatments like aged garlic
| that certainly do have an effect.
|
| ETA: This wiki article has a good overview: https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_disco...
|
| Another notable category of ancient drugs is laxatives.
|
| The first synthetic drugs did not begin to appear until
| around the mid-1800s. In 1832 chloral hydrate was produced,
| which was the first synthetic sleeping drug, but it wasn't
| used clinically until 1869.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Pretty much everything we now use as herbal tea, if highly
| concentrated, will have a notable effect.
|
| E.G: Thyme has well known antimicrobial properties and
| thymol is (or at least was) a component of commercial
| mouthwash.
|
| Even when we don't make drugs out of the plant itself, it
| could have been used for the properties we know about
| today.
|
| E.G: common vervain is known to have diuretic properties,
| so it's not a long shot to think it has been used for this
| particular reason at some point. Today we use diuretic to
| treat heart failure, liver cirrhosis, or hypertension.
| While they may not have had any way to catalog all this, it
| seems unlikely nobody ever associated the consumption of a
| lot of diuretic with people getting better for one reason
| or another.
|
| People were not dumb, and there were a lot of them, for a
| long time. They likely tried a lot of combinations of
| things, on purpose or by accident.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > People were not dumb
|
| That people tend to think of our ancestors as being less
| intelligent is one of my pet peeves. There is no reason
| to even suspect that they weren't at least as smart as
| modern man.
|
| What they lacked was the accumulation of knowledge that
| times gives. "If I see further, it's because I stand on
| the shoulders of giants."
| belenos46 wrote:
| Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical
| Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many
| modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of
| documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the
| medical practice of herbalism.
|
| And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of
| preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual
| cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus
| congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my
| mind.
|
| Plants are where we get a _lot_ of medicines from, and
| while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that
| information not get spread around (it 's basically the
| whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western
| medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if
| you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's
| still totally possible to do so.
| tekla wrote:
| > it's basically the whole reason we don't have a
| widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the
| US
|
| Lol, the west doesn't do herbalism because if it works,
| we just call it medicine.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| The west doesn't believe in herbal remedies because they
| aren't patentable by the pharma industrial complex to
| make $$$
| strken wrote:
| _America_ doesn 't _prescribe_ some remedies, herbal or
| otherwise, because they aren 't _FDA approved_ due to an
| unnecessarily burdensome approval process that costs tens
| of millions of dollars to navigate, alongside a culture
| of civil lawsuits that causes doctors to act with
| excessive caution.
| asdff wrote:
| "Essence of willow bark" is an example of an herbal
| remedy the pharma industrial complex produces with no
| patent currently: generic aspirin.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Nonsense. They happily sell out of patent medications by
| the dumpster load.
|
| They test it, if it works they sell it, else they reject
| it.
| tekla wrote:
| No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a
| pill out of the part that works.
| drekk wrote:
| It's overly reductionist to assume that all herbal
| remedies are the result of 1, maybe 2 active ingredients.
| The incentive for making a pill is less about efficacy
| and more about patentability. I can't patent camphor, but
| I can patent a 3% menthol & 3% camphor ointment suspended
| in a gel base (Fast Freeze).
|
| I don't think it's fair to say the west as a supposed
| monolith rejects "woo", especially given the popularity
| of pseudoscience re: vaccines, homeopathy, Reiki,
| acupuncture, cleanses, etc.
|
| I'm reminded of the great anthropological paper titled
| Body Ritual Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner: https://w
| ww.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...
| sonicshadow wrote:
| Why take a thing that's been known for thousands of years
| to be perfectly safe, when you can take this thing
| invented in a lab and tested on mice for 10?
| Drakim wrote:
| > George Washington woke up at 2 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1799,
| with a sore throat. After a series of medical procedures,
| including the draining of nearly 40 percent of his blood,
| he died that evening.
|
| Old medicine and medical treatments were absolutely
| lethal compared to what we have in modern times.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Iatrogenic deaths are still incredibly high today. Modern
| medicine is the evolution of the doctors regarded highly
| enough to treat the president, not the people who filled
| their prescriptions in the woods.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| We certainly improved, but in 1799 I think it was already
| the age of pseudoscientific medicine, where people
| thought they were superior to traditional herbalist,
| simply because they read some books. In other words, I
| don't think any traditional medicine man would have done
| that treatment.
|
| (Apart from that, I surely go to a hospital if I am
| really sick, but for everything light, I rather find
| something else, than some drug, where I don't know if it
| is helping me, or the doctors pension fund)
| golergka wrote:
| Earth has been known to be flat, women and POC have been
| known to be inferior and homosexuality has been known to
| be a sin.
|
| But thankfully, humanity moves on, and among other
| innovations, came up with such things as statistical
| methods and drug testing. But if you so desire, you're
| absolutely free to distrust modern western medicine --
| after all, a lot of prominent people do, for example,
| late Steve Jobs.
| pengaru wrote:
| > No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a
| pill out of the part that works.
|
| No, the west makes a pill out of the part that's
| commercially profitable, which is a very different set of
| criteria than "works". Things like shelf life/stability,
| cost and availability, dose:response curves that are
| _very_ predictable for the entire human population, etc.
|
| What goes into pills has far more to do with what works
| for business than what works for people.
| 6177c40f wrote:
| Plenty of stuff. For example, Mercury, which was used as an
| ointment and a laxative, among other uses. Here's a
| surprisingly readable excerpt from a medical text written in
| 1787: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5545546/
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.piratesurgeon.com/pages/surgeon_pages/dispensato...
|
| The smelling salts would definitely work. The oil of Wormwood
| probably worked to remove intestinal worms. A lot of the others
| I'm not sure passed the "first, do no harm" test.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| Luc wrote:
| I was wondering about the domed base of some of the bottles.
| Luckily there's a 'Bottle Bases Page':
| https://sha.org/bottle/bases.htm
|
| > It may appear that the steep rise or pushed-up portion of the
| base was done to reduce the interior volume of the bottle.
| However, it was more likely done for some or all of the following
| reasons: for bottle strength enhancing, stability (i.e., the
| process helps form an even base and keeps the rough glass of some
| pontil scars out of the way so the bottle sits upright without
| wobbling), to provide a means of turning bottles in a stack using
| the fingers and thumb (a procedure still followed in traditional
| champagne manufacture), and/or possibly to trap content
| sedimentation (Jones 1971a; Boow 1991).
| ant6n wrote:
| Was this found using that random Web 1.0 link from just recently?
| toastedwedge wrote:
| I suspect we'll see a number of interesting websites posted
| over the next few weeks because of that web 1.0 finder. I
| personally can't wait
| beej71 wrote:
| I just have to say hats off to whoever decided to register this
| niche domain. :)
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(page generated 2023-07-17 23:02 UTC)