20 BANNED Old West Doctor Secrets History Tried to HIDE

PART 2:

 Number three, mercury as a onesizefits-all medicine. In the Old West, if you went to a doctor with any problem, chances were you’d walk out with the same prescription. Calamol, a compound made from mercury chloride, fever, syphilis, constipation, a headache. It didn’t matter what you had, the treatment was the same.

 Doctors handed it out like it was aspirin. The problem is mercury is a powerful poison. Patients started losing their teeth. Their jaw would literally rot and many ended up with permanent brain damage. And here’s the most disturbing part. When the patient started drooling uncontrollably from the poisoning, doctors took that as a sign the medicine was working.

 The more you salivated, the more they thought the cure was close. In reality, your body was being destroyed from the inside out. Number four, saloon dentists. Toothache in the Old West was serious business. There was no office, no trained dentist. The one pulling teeth was the barber, the blacksmith, or any guy with a pair of pliers and some nerve.

 The patient would sit in a wooden chair, sometimes right inside the saloon, bite down on a rag, and hope it ended fast. Anesthesia, cheap whiskey if you were lucky, sterilization. Nobody knew what that was. The problem is a badly done extraction open the door to infection. An abscess that today gets solved with antibiotics in a week. Back then turned into sepsis in just a few days.

 And a lot of people died like that. Not from a gunshot, not from a brawl, but from a rotten tooth nobody knew how to treat, right? It was so common that some historians estimate dental problems killed more people in the West than duels. Number five, the miasma theory. In the Old West, doctors were absolutely sure diseases came from bad smells. They called it miasmas.

 If the air smelled bad, it was poison. Simple as that. Because of that belief, hospitals and infirmaries kept windows shut tight. The idea was to keep the foul outside air from getting in. But the result was the opposite of what they expected. Stuffy rooms with zero ventilation became perfect breeding grounds for infection.

 A cowboy would come in with a cut on his arm and weeks later he’d be dying from tuberculosis or fever. Nobody understood why surgeons would operate with the same dirty hands from one patient to the next, thinking they were doing everything right. Germ theory already existed in Europe, but it only really caught on in the United States around the 1880s and 1890s.

Until then, the biggest enemy inside a hospital wasn’t the disease. It was the hospital itself. Number six, Ldnum, the opioid crisis. Nobody calls that. Long before the modern crisis, the Old West already had its own opioid problem. Ladum, opium dissolved in alcohol, was sold freely in drugstores, general stores, post offices, and even by traveling peddlers.

Anyone could buy it with no prescription and no questions asked. It was prescribed for everything. toothaches, insomnia, coughs, cramps, and even so-called female nerves. Mothers gave doses to babies who cried too much. Cowboys used it to push through injuries while riding a horse. Addiction spread quietly through towns and farms.

Thousands got hooked without even understanding what was happening. Nobody called it a crisis. It was just medicine. Decades would pass before any law tried to control sales. By the time regulation finally came, entire generations had already been consumed by addiction. Number seven, bloodletting all the way into 1880.

 In the 1880s, medicine in Europe had dropped bloodletting a long time ago. But in the Old West, frontier doctors were still cutting veins and using leeches like it was the cure for everything. High fever, bloodletting, a bullet infection, bloodletting. They even treated an open fracture by taking blood out of the guy. The problem is the patient already showed up wrecked, dehydrated, bleeding, barely able to stay awake.

 Then the doctor took even more blood. The body couldn’t handle it and went into shock. Blood pressure crashed, organs shut down, and the man died right there on the table. And the most ridiculous part, the doctor wrote in the record that the patient didn’t survive the illness. Nobody questioned it. Nobody investigated.

 The procedure that killed him was considered the right treatment. How many cowboys and settlers died not from the bullet or the fever, but from the cure they were given? Number eight, fake diplomas and madeup doctors. In the Old West, any guy could wake up one morning and decide he was a doctor. No joke.

 All he had to do was buy a sign, rent a room, and start seeing patients. Nobody asked for a diploma. Nobody checked anything. And worse, a lot of these guys didn’t even know the difference between the flu and pneumonia. Some people bought diplomas from cataloges through the mail for a few bucks. Fake schools would issue nicel lookinging certificates that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

 Meanwhile, people died from simple procedures that any nurse today could handle in minutes. Whole towns depended on one single doctor who learned medicine by reading a book during a wagon trip. The first serious regulation of the medical profession in the United States only came after 1900. Until then, your life was in the hands of luck.

 Number nine, bullets left inside on purpose. In the Old West, getting shot wasn’t always a death sentence. What really killed you came afterward. Medicine back then believed that taking the bullet out of the body was riskier than leaving it in there. Sounds crazy, but that was the rule. The real problem was doctors sticking dirty fingers and instruments with zero hygiene into the open wound.

That turned any bullet hole into a deadly infection. The most famous case happened outside the prairies, but it proves the point exactly. In 1881, President James Garfield was shot. The wound by itself wasn’t fatal, but 12 different doctors stuck their fingers into the wound trying to find the bullet. None of them washed their hands.

Garfield held on for 2 months and died of infection. It wasn’t the bullet that killed the president. It was the doctors. Number 10, arsenic as a beauty supplement. In the Old West, arsenic was sold freely in any drugstore or general store like it was a vitamin. Women took small doses to lighten their skin, and men used it as a tonic to feel more energetic.

 The problem is the difference between the dose that supposedly helped and the dose that killed was almost nothing. Doctors prescribed it without thinking twice. And when a patient died poisoned, nobody sued the doctor. On the contrary, people felt sorry for him for losing someone under his care. Arsenic was also the favorite poison of anyone who wanted to get rid of an inconvenient husband or wife because the symptoms looked like a natural illness.

Authorities rarely investigated and many murders got passed off as death by natural causes for entire decades back then. Number 11. In the Old West, giving birth was a gamble with death. In hospitals in the big cities back east, perpol fever killed up to 35% of mothers. But out on the prairies, far from any formally trained doctor, women had a better chance of surviving.

 The reason frontier midwives washed their hands between each delivery out of simple habit. Doctors, on the other hand, went straight from examining corpses to delivering babies without even changing their shirts. When Ignat Semlvvice proved that connection in 1847, the medical community mocked him. They called the guy crazy.

 He died in an asylum. Meanwhile, in the dusty little towns of the West, women kept giving birth with the help of neighbors and indigenous midwives who had been practicing basic hygiene for generations. It took medicine another 40 years to accept the obvious. Sometimes everyday knowledge was decades ahead of official science.

 If you’re enjoying our video, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment. Number 12, epidemics that wiped out towns. Have you ever stopped to think how an entire town could just disappear off the map without a single shot being fired? In the Old West, the deadliest enemy didn’t carry a revolver. Chalera, Typhus, and smallox killed faster than any gunslinger.

 And the reason was simple. The water people drank came from the same place they dumped sewage. There was no sanitation. When an outbreak hit, the so-called treatment was brutal. Heavy purgatives and ice cold baths, stuff that often sped up death. And here’s the part nobody likes to hear. Quarantine did exist, yes, but only for the people who didn’t have money.

 The rich hitched up their wagons and disappeared. The poor got locked in, waiting for luck to decide. In some outbreaks, three out of 10 residents didn’t make it. Towns that were growing turned into open air cemeteries overnight. Number 13, electrotherapy. Shocks as a cure. In the Old West, where a real doctor was rare, any guy with a fancy looking machine could pass himself off as one.

In the 1880s, electrical devices started showing up in towns like Tombstone and Dodge City, promising to cure everything. Paralysis, joint pain, even impotence. The patient would sit in a chair, get shocks to the muscles, and pay a fortune for it. There was no scientific basis behind it. These machines burned the skin, caused heart problems, and in some cases killed.

 The scariest part is they were completely legal. Sold through cataloges, advertised in respectable newspapers. In a territory where the law could barely handle gunslingers, nobody regulated medicine. People trusted it because electricity felt like the future. And con artists cashed in on that hope until the end of the century.

 Number 14, the battlefield as a school. The Civil War was the biggest medical classroom the United States ever had. More than 600,000 soldiers died, and the ones who survived often owed it to students who had barely cracked open an anatomy book. These young guys learned in the field with saws and basic formulas surrounded by piles of amputated limbs.

 The chief surgeon sometimes supervised 10 tables at the same time. What mattered was speed, not precision. When the war ended, thousands of those men went back home and hung a doctor’s sign on the door. They brought to the Old West everything they knew. Cut fast, stitch fast, and move on. What they didn’t bring was any sense of hygiene or decent diagnosis.

They used the same instruments without washing them from patient to patient. Ideas from 1860 kept killing people until the end of the century. Number 15, morphine by mail in the Old West. After the Civil War, thousands of veterans came home addicted to morphine, which was used without any real control in field hospitals.

It got so common it even picked up a popular name, soldiers disease. And here’s the part that really hits. Anyone could open a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog and order syringes and morphine through the mail. No prescription, no questions. It showed up at your door like any other package. Doctors back then didn’t really understand what addiction was, so they treated withdrawal with more morphine.

 In western towns where a doctor was a rare thing, people self-medicated by following the printed instructions that came with the kit. It’s estimated that by the end of the 19th century, there were more than 300,000 Americans dependent on opiates in a population much smaller than today. Number 16. Hospitals were places you went to die.

In the Old West, a hospital wasn’t a place people associated with getting better. It was basically a sentence. More than half the patients who went in for simple surgeries didn’t come out alive. And the reason wasn’t the operation itself. It was the hospital. Dirty instruments, open wounds left unprotected, doctors going from one patient to the next without washing their hands.

 Nobody really understood how infections spread. The result was predictable, gang green, fever, and death. If you had money, you made sure you were operated on at home in your own bed, far from that environment. And if you didn’t have that choice, you prayed before walking through the door. Civil War veterans already knew this firsthand.

 A lot of soldiers survived the battlefield only to die in field hospitals days later. That distrust lasted for decades and shaped how Americans saw medicine for generations. Number 17, trepation. Drilling holes in the skull as treatment. In the Old West, if you took a horse kick to the head or started having seizures, the town doctor might decide the solution was to open a hole in your skull. Yep.

 With a hand drill with no decent anesthesia, the guy would drill through the bone until the brain was exposed. They called it trepation, a practice that goes back 7,000 years. Frontier doctors used it to treat fractures, pressure in the skull, and even what they called madness. The problem was the conditions were awful.

Poorly cleaned tools, dirty hands, dust everywhere. The result, brain infections killed more people than the original injury itself. Even so, some surgeons swore it worked. The truth is, most patients didn’t survive long enough to tell the story. Number 18, indigenous healers versus white medicine. Who was right? In the Old West, when someone got sick, the town doctor was often more dangerous than the disease itself.

Bloodletting, massive doses of mercury, and brutal purges were standard. Meanwhile, healers from different indigenous nations used willow bark for fever and pain. The same idea that later became aspirin. They used cinchona bark against fevers that we now know were malaria. Knowledge passed down generation to generation, tested for centuries.

 Here’s the detail. Nobody likes to admit during chalera outbreaks and other epidemics on the prairies, indigenous groups who refused treatment from white doctors had better survival rates. Trained doctors were literally poisoning their patients with mercury, thinking it was a cure. Western medicine back then killed more than it saved, while native remedies actually worked. Number 19.

 The most famous doctor in the West never studied medicine. Doc Holiday is remembered for the gunfight at the OK Corral, but not many people know his degree was in dentistry, not medicine. He treated teeth in Dodge City and Tombstone. But he ended up dealing with all kinds of problems because there simply wasn’t anyone else around.

 And here’s the scary part. Holiday at least had a degree. In the Old West, any guy who bought a leather bag and talked with confidence could show up in a new town and call himself a doctor. There was no license, no registry, no oversight. Dozens of men carried the nickname doc without ever opening an anatomy book. Whole communities trusted their lives to these guys for years.

 Some learned on the job and did a decent job. Others caused more damage than the disease itself. That’s how the frontier was. You either believe the guy or died with no treatment at all. Number 20, the legacy. How long it took to change. A lot of people think that when the 19th century ended, Old West medicine ended with it. Not really.

 In 1910, a report called the Flexner report revealed something nobody wanted to admit. Twothirds of medical schools in the United States were a joke. They taught little, demanded even less, and sent out people who barely knew the difference between an infection and indigestion. The report forced dozens of those schools to shut down.

 But real change took time. It was only between 1910 and 1920 that modern medicine started becoming the true standard in the country. That means brutal practices like amputations without proper anesthesia and mercurybased remedies stayed common long after Hollywood says the west was over. The frontier may have closed in 1890, but its medical methods lived on for another 30 years.