A BuzzFeed gallery gathers 35 historical medical images, including photographs and illustrations of operations, psychiatric care and treatment devices. Several captions identify procedures as outdated and compare earlier equipment with modern care.
Examples include a 1946 photo of a doctor drilling into a patient’s skull before a lobotomy, polio patients using iron lungs and a 1949 incubator holding a newborn. The gallery also features illustrations of trephination, an operation that involved drilling, scraping or cutting a hole in the skull, and historical psychiatric restraint devices.
Other entries show tuberculosis patients treated outdoors in winter, lying on iron beds, and amputees with mud covering their legs. The article says the mud was intended to ease pain and improve tissue around the stump, and that mud therapy is now used mainly in spas.
