"The blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of life," wrote Pliny the Elder.
It wasn't just blood early Romans clamored for. Raw human livers were used to treat epilepsy, too. Anthropophagic remedies persisted for centuries, with medieval executioners fending off sick people who eagerly sought fresh dead bodies to cure the "falling down" disease.
Because seizures are episodic, these treatments seemed to work, said Lydia Kang, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and author of the book, .
"They stemmed from this magical idea that young, healthy males had energy. If you could harness that energy right at the point of death, you could ingest some of this healthfulness," Kang explained. "In other words: you are what you eat."
Cannibalism wasn't the worst therapy Kang uncovered in her research. Other treatments were dangerous, even deadly.
The Swiss physician Paracelsus prescribed drinkable gold -- aurum potable -- to make the body "indestructible," even though it was toxic and could cause kidney damage. Philadelphia doctor and founding father Benjamin Rush advocated extreme amounts of mercury-based calomel and bloodletting to treat yellow fever. Unfortunately, the fatality rate of Dr. Rush's patients turned out to be 46%, considerably higher than yellow fever's 33% fatality rate, according to Thomas Jefferson.
Even medical students in Victorian England resorted to strychnine as a modern-day energy drink, knowing full well it was rat poison.
"Strychnine isn't something you see in your pharmacopoeia every day, but when I looked into it, I could see why people thought it was a great tonic," Kang noted. In small doses, strychnine is a short-term stimulant, jolting the nervous system much like caffeine. But unlike caffeine, it doesn't take much strychnine to kill you -- just 5 milligrams.
"We often don't get to study medical history in our education," Kang added. "It's grounding to figure out why some of these treatments were accepted from both a societal point of view and a chemical perspective."
Surprisingly, some modern treatments have roots in deadly ancient practices.
Take arsenic. "We think of arsenic as what people classically used to kill other people -- it was the inheritance powder, the king's poison," Kang said. The Medici and Borgia families in renaissance Europe, for example, used it routinely to poison people they wanted to eliminate.
But arsenic made its way into medications, including one called Fowler's Solution. Created in 1786, Fowler's Solution was 1% potassium arsenate mixed with lavender flavoring (to prevent patients from mistaking it for water) and prescribed until the 20th century. Charles Darwin relied on Fowler's Solution, possibly to the point of arsenic poisoning. Karl Marx reportedly stopped using it because it "dulls my mind too much."
Like many medicinals, Fowler's Solution was used for a lot of things that didn't make sense -- fevers, syphilis, sleeping sickness, even as a general tonic -- and some things that ultimately did, like cancer. In the 1800s, physicians noticed Fowler's Solution seemed to stop the symptoms of chronic myeloid leukemia.
"I don't think they were able to study it as rigorously as we would today, but they had an inkling arsenic was doing some good from an anticancer standpoint," Kang said. "That seems to have played out to the point where arsenic is now used to treat promyelocytic leukemia."
And bloodletting, the prescription that killed many people throughout history including perhaps George Washington, is still a remedy for hemochromatosis.
"As far-fetched and strange as they sound, some things in the book do have some utility in modern day medicine, albeit in a very narrow way," Kang observed.