The process of developing new medications is exceptionally long, involving several phases of clinical trials and years of work in laboratories, meaning that many medicines available in your local pharmacy have taken decades to become available.

This process, which at a minimum involves extensive peer-reviewed lab testing, clinical trials, licensing approval from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, approval from the NHS and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

It is a rigorous approval process that ensures that any medicines are safe, effective, meet quality

standards and meet the needs of those who take them.

This was not always the case, and there are some treatments and medicines in an age before the modern regulatory system that are unfathomable.

Soothing Syrup

Infamously nicknamed “baby killers” by the American Medical Association, Mrs.Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and other similar patent medicines were marketed as teething pain relievers, alongside a raft of exceptionally dubious claims.

The problem was that its active ingredients were morphine and alcohol in obscenely dangerous concentrations; it contained 20 times the amount of morphine as laudanum (or Dropizol) with recommended dosages that would invariably kill children via overdose.

They would eventually be withdrawn from the market, but even in an era of cocaine cough drops and heroin being marketed as the “safer” alternative to opium, any “soothing syrup” was a deeply irresponsible product.

Milk Transfusions

Thanks to advanced knowledge about blood and blood types, transfusions are a safe, life-saving procedure to help people who have lost a lot of blood or are suffering from a condition that

affects how their cells function.

Prior to this knowledge, however, blood transfusions were seen as so risky that doctors were more willing to inject another substance into the veins instead: milk.

The theory was that the fat cells in milk would form white blood cells and serve as a safer alternative to the risks of blood transfusions in that era. Instead, the results were exactly what one would expect.

Most died soon after being injected, one woman only avoided immediate death by being injected with a mixture of morphine and whiskey, and once safe blood transfusions existed, the concept of milk injections was thankfully left in the past.

Radioactive Medicine

The destructive qualities of radiation are very commonly used in cancer treatment, but before the true nature of radioactivity was known and appreciated, there was an entire medical generation of quackery that believed radiation would heal cells and tissue.

Whilst there were many strange products from uranium cereal bowls to radioactive toothpastes, the most infamous case was that of Radithor and its most famous victim, Eben Byers.

An amateur golfer and socialite, he started taking the radioactive tonic on the recommendation of a doctor who received a kickback from inventor and Harvard dropout William Bailey.

After taking 1400 doses of radium water, his body started to disintegrate, and the shocking tale of a healthy man whose body fell apart due to radioactive medicine ended the era of its popularity.

Mr Bailey had no remorse for Mr Byers’ death, claiming that he had never suffered any ill effects from his radium water before dying of bladder cancer in 1949.