Thank you Florence!

The pharmacy has definitely been my favorite part of this trip so far. I have always been very interested in the history of medicine and what practices were like. There is a show on Netflix called The Knick that is centered around a surgeon in the early 1900’s that I found very interesting (and you might too), so it was interesting to see some of those tools up close and personal. I am just baffled to think about some of the extremely barbaric practices and I would have felt terrified to have been living during that time, especially if I ever saw my doctor coming at me with that giant, dirty needle. I would have rather continued suffering through whatever debilitating disease I was dealing with, I think. And before that time, before they had needles, they would just cut the person open and jab them with a blunt tip, inject the medicine, and stitch them back up. I found myself cringing and feeling slightly nauseated after hearing some of the stories. (I was apparently the only person that thought it was extremely hot in the museum.) I think that a lot of the medicine must have been wasted during this process and it caused me to wonder about medicines that cannot be absorbed intramuscularly. Were those medicines then just floating around in the tissue causing damage or what? I think about how disease spreads and cringe at the thought of being treated at a hospital before the “germ theory” and sterilization came about. Thank you Florence Nightingale!! (She was the first nurse to realize that handwashing and keeping things clean really helped avoid infection and produced lower mortality rates). Luckily for our generation, there have been many, many advances in medicine since this time and I think, while it could be improved in ways of course, we have a pretty great healthcare system today.

One thing our tour guide told us that I found pretty interesting was that one of the very, very few things in the museum that are still used today are leeches. Back then, they believed that if a person was ill, had a virus, and some poison had been ingested, they would just slice the person open and let them bleed for a while. This was called bloodletting. Thankfully, they started using leeches for this process instead. I had never heard of leeches being used in the healthcare setting. the leeches release a natural anticoagulant and the leeches will feed on the blood until they are full, and then they release themselves from the skin. Today, leeches are still used after some surgeries that might require a person to have blood flow restored to an area of the body. This would be common during things like limbs or appendages that needed to be reattached. I honestly feel like this would be another procedure I would have to say “pass” on. I of course prefer to be the one performing procedures on patients, not receiving them.