"How Did They Make This Far?": 40 Medical Professionals Remember The Most Notorious Darwin Award Candidates They've Ever Met

To be fair, pre-modern health specialists had just as little common sense as some of the patients mentioned here. Bloodletting was a shockingly common procedure that generally left the person weak and more susceptible to disease, and it’s particularly strange how often it was employed given that at the time people did already know how important it was to have blood.

Traditional Chinese medicine goes even further, as one of the main funders of the ivory trade. Multiple animal species are at risk because people, despite living in a modern, educated society, still think a random rhino’s horn will magically heal them. Even though they can very easily compare the effects of traditional medicine compared to modern medicine, people still chose the former.  

Other attempts to systematically approach medicine have just as many strange ideas. The ancient Greeks, for all their developments, still believed that the body was run by four humors that correspond, improbably, to earth, wind, water, and fire. How exactly earth and fire were vitally important to the operation of our body was never properly explained, as one doesn’t have to be a modern scientist to see how fire can hurt a lot more than it heals. 

Medieval logic had a certain logic to it, however. Once you accept that the disease is supernatural, generally a sign or punishment from God, then the doctor can focus on treating the symptoms, as the cause is, obviously, the transgressions of the victim. This also meant that doctors could easily explain why draining a person's blood seemed to kill them, as really it was God’s punishment, not poor medicine at fault. 

This is also why people would often travel to monasteries to be healed. If the affliction is divine in nature, one would have to fix their relationship with God to get anything done. On the one hand, this would actually remove some sick individuals from urban centers, although we now can imagine the strain that pre-car overland travel would have on an ill individual. 

Many of these practices stayed around until the 19th century, when, finally, a more systematic approach was applied. George Washington, for example, had his blood drained as a response to a sore throat, which most likely made a common ailment worse and resulted in his death. There doesn't seem to have been a good understanding among medical specialists that the same procedure they had done for over a thousand years was, actually, killing people.