The Power Of Ancient Placebo Effect | Gods & Monsters | Absolute History

officially we britons have been christian for more than 1500 years but scratch the surface and you'll find our ancestors believed in far more than christ and the cross [Music] pagan gods witches demons evil spirits were all proclaimed as terrifying fact now i want to uncover what beliefs and fears really built britain [Music] this week along with a team of top historians i'm discovering why our ancestors were so convinced disease had supernatural causes and what magic treatments they thought would cure them why were evil spirits behind our first attempts at brain surgery epilepsy would have been seen to be possession by an evil spirit what did shooting pains have to do with elves and sprites and in celtic times what did it take to make you strong as an ox oh god i'll tell you what this suit's leaking come on need your help now nowadays if you've got a serious medical issue a quick phone call will get you a well-trained team who'll normally know what the problem is and how to deal with it but you don't have to go too far back in time to find a world where disease wasn't biological it was supernatural and instead of bacteria and viruses and dodgy genes our ancestors blamed sprites demons even god himself just a few hundred years ago our ancestors still believed the world was inhabited by a whole host of supernatural creatures out to do them harm they came in many forms from evil spirits to demons and even elves if they attacked you it was thought terrible diseases and illnesses would follow but why were our forefathers so convinced these paranormal entities were behind their ailments and what sort of treatments could you use to fight their diabolic diseases i'm going to enter our ancestors world of magic medicine to find out surprisingly around 1500 years ago one of the creatures it was believed could send you to the doctors was an elf back in anglo-saxon britain many people from royalty to peasants believed in elves they feared their invisible disease-laden spears and arrows were what caused sudden sharp pains i'm meeting up with dr alarick hall to find out more about the phenomenon called elfshot [Music] what was an elf they looked a lot like normal people if you ever saw one should be a bit unlikely you could just meet one and not know that you'd met an elf until you went away and looked round and couldn't see them anymore the idea of being made ill by external forces and entities attacking the body was so widespread among our ancestors it had a lasting effect on medical terminology [Music] in english we might talk about a stabbing pain or a shooting pain and this kind of idea comes from from the sense that you might have been stabbed or shot we also know people who've had a stroke means they've been struck by something that's where the word comes from but why would our ancestors think they were being shot at by supernatural creatures well some experts have argued that arrowheads from the stone age may have reinforced this fantastical idea in their minds the anglo-saxons had little or no knowledge of their neolithic forefathers and probably thought all man-made arrowheads were metal people were looking at arrowheads like this a stone age arrowhead before the bronze age before the iron age for the romans before the anglo-saxons people in england were kind of picking these up around here around west oh you can actually just delve into the sand and find these lying about now the interesting thing about it is that it really it looks quite delicate and mystical doesn't it it seems natural that it would be associated with supernatural beings you're kind of neighbors that you never see the elves although these arrowheads were made of stone our ancestors thought these weapons were invisible when used by elves being hit by one meant disease and illness would definitely follow what kind of illnesses did they think were caused by ours the most mild sounding seems to be skin ailments we don't know quite what rashes may be we know that they caused sort of sharp violent internal pains and elves are associated with causing things that kind of mess with your state of mind fever malaria just anything that would be associated with what we might call madness once you believed your body had been pierced by the disease-laden arrowhead or spear of an elf the best cure was to try and get it out and one way to do this could have been a spell that would enable a knife to perform supernatural surgery [Music] take the knife put it in the liquid we don't know for sure how this spell was supposed to work but our best guess is a knife became magical to remove the elf's invisible weapon from the patient's body without penetrating the flesh thankfully he didn't cut me there's a good old knifey feel about that as it goes on it's actually quite quite an experience it's a bit like an exorcism it's just like out demons out isn't it it is that's right it's showing that you can actually engage with the forces that are against you um these aren't just something that that's out there and completely unassailable you can actually kind of do something about this threat [Music] from a scientific point of view there's no clinical benefit to this treatment but offering people a reason for their illness and then appearing to do something about it would at least have given patients some relief and hope belief was by far the strongest and most potent ingredient in much of our ancestors medicine healers were promoting mind over mata but while elves would attack you from afar there were other supernatural creatures our ancestors feared far more ones that could physically enter your body like a parasite to spread disease from within evil spirits these malicious entities were believed to take residence in the head and around 2000 years ago in rome and britain they were blamed for cerebral problems such as epilepsy but what were you supposed to do to get these spirits out once they'd taken up residence here at the royal college of surgeons there's evidence our ancestors found a very disturbing solution they believed if you cut a hole in the skull these spirits would fly out professor miranda oldhaus green has tracked down the skull of a 20 year old woman from the roman period in the second century a.d which bears the characteristic hallmarks of this surgical exorcism this person possibly had a disease that was caused by an evil spirit something that invaded that space and you have to have a hole to get it out that was done quite deliberately you've got quite a regular hole which was cut using a surgical knife surgical why couldn't that be a spear or an accident it's too regular it looks as though it's deliberately done using a fairly fine baited instrument somebody who knew exactly what they were doing and what they were trying to achieve they were trying to get out to drill out almost a section of the skull and the idea then would be that the evil spirit would escape or be driven out of the hole my inference is that she suffered from something like epilepsy or a brain tumor or something which would have caused her to behave in an odd way epilepsy more than any other ailment involving the brain would have been something which it would have been seen to be possession by an evil spirit and it would have been terrifying there's archaeological evidence that the romans weren't the first to do this operation in britain incredibly this was attempted by our neolithic ancestors more than six thousand years ago but how would they have performed a procedure that's so dangerous for the patient flint napper extraordinaire john lord is going to show me what tools would have been used for the job what you need to do is put your finger where you can see it and hit it and also hit the flip it won't hurt your finger you'll just knock it out the way okay and that way flicking the wrist you've done it hey [Laughter] i've got two little blades here that's a beauty that's a beauty look at that neolithic people were the first farmers in britain even 6 000 years ago they were skilled manufacturers of farming tools and it seems surgical equipment we're actually making a mechanized uh implement here one of the first machines of the past with our flint blades sharpened it's time to meet the patient today we're using a pig's head thousands of years ago this would have been an unanesthetized person who would have been convulsing with epilepsy or another cerebral condition the first stage in this operation to force out evil spirits would be to gain access to the skull by removing the skin it never occurred to me that you'd create a flap so you could put the flap back afterwards yeah once the skin was lifted the flint tools could get to work on human bone this would be the most unpleasant part of the operation imagine how terrified the person must have been well all this was going on and with razor sharp blades it's shocking how quickly we're through the skull and beyond you're actually through am i through you are actually through the skull once they'd pierced the skull with the tip of the blade neolithic surgeons then wanted to make the hole big enough for the malevolent spirits to escape but the bigger the hole the more likely the chance of brain damage it would be an absolute nightmare wouldn't it operation is over john and i have no way of knowing whether our particular patient would have survived this brutal and traumatic procedure but how did miranda's roman woman fare in the second century can we tell from that skull whether she survived the operation sadly this person didn't survive we can tell that because there's no healing but there are other instances of heads with trypanning or drafting where bone growth is present and that means they actually survived what we now know is that some cerebral conditions can be triggered by swelling in the brain and cutting a hole in the skull to allow it to expand can provide real help so although our ancestors were doing this for very different reasons they weren't necessarily wrong to attempt this treatment more than a millennium later britain was firmly christian evil spirits were still being blamed for many mental and physical health problems but they were now associated with the devil and known as demons demons were thought to be hugely powerful and in the 17th century when the plague returned to london killing thousands some people feared the devil and his demons could be behind it i'm about to find out for myself why there are attempts to fight this diabolic disease head-on not with surgery or medicines but with smells i'm investigating the magical medical world of our ancestors where disease wasn't spread by germs and viruses but by malevolent supernatural creatures out to do us harm i've seen how disease could be caused by elves and stone age spirits but now i'm going to discover what some of our ancestors did when they feared demons could be behind the worst disease ever known to man the plague in the 16th and 17th centuries our forefathers lived in terror of demons entering the body like parasites to take their souls and cause mental and physical health problems [Music] demons were thought to get into the body by morphing into different forms from food to smoke and even liquids once inside their aim was to cause corruption and ill health in their host [Music] when the plague returned to london in 1665 killing tens of thousands of people foul odors were one of the suspected causes while some saw this as a scientific theory others were more superstitious and associated pungent smells with the devil and his demons as if these odours had come straight from hell the superstition that diseases spread by smells is known as miasma and professor justin champion is going to show me how it was thought to work justin welcome to the 17th century this is the plague world this is the world where people actually thought that smells could bring on the plague absolutely this evil wicked disease is taking away one in four people the dominant explanations for what the plague was was this theory of miasma the infected air from bad smells from bad objects comes into your body and starts corrupting your body from the inside in common folklore food was sometimes thought to rot and stink because the devil or a demon had touched it and while cleanliness and sweet smells were godly filth and stench were the devil's work this is the smell of rotting flesh oh it's got things crawling all over it i don't want to breathe in too hard one might guttman knows what the early one in the 17th century you're a dead man now you you sniffed the infection in the 21st century if you believed foul demonic odours could give you the plague the best way to protect yourself was with fresh healthy god-given smells times of plague the price of rosemary goes up from 12p a bundle to 12 shillings a bundle so this is used a lot it really is soothing actually after smelling those dreadful things such was the conviction that good smells could protect you from this evil disease that one doctor nathaniel hodges experimented with a way to use them to keep himself safe in plague zones he adapted a traditional costume so that it could carry large amounts of sweet smelling substances why the bird's head it's not really a bird's head this is designed to hold this we're going to pack that up with herbs a variety of some of the other spices so you're breathing in sweet smells all the time the main point is obviously to protect you [Music] let's just road test whether it works get your beak into that mate nice i can actually inhale without gagging because i've got this great wall of rosemary and thyme and much much better [Music] nathaniel hodges believed it was the perfume-packed beak that would keep him safe but it was actually the other parts of the costume that would have offered more protection from the real causes of the disease fleas living on rats and a contagious viral infection spread by coughs and sneezes with his sweet smelling bird suit plague doctors like hodges tried to help others by eliminating demonic odors from their homes this was often done in houses where everyone had died before the new occupants moved in so isn't there still miasma all over this house absolutely we've got to do something about it you can imagine the stench once that door had been broken open maybe the dead bodies had been taken out but that that house would have rotted it would have stank to get rid of one set of bad odors you have to use even more powerful ones vinegar a bit of vinegar draping great sheets a bit of air a bit of brutal perfume cleaning it all out [ __ ] spells if vinegar wasn't enough to eradicate diabolic foul smells some doctors would try an even more powerful deodorizer gunpowder they used explosives ah they used explosives and we're going to rather delicately have a go i'm a historian remember but i think i know what i'm doing but it wasn't just any explosive people were after what was needed was an olfactory offensive a true scent bomb and the objective is that that stink that smell stays in the house for quite a while ready yep god it's like a firework isn't it you see how thick this stuff is though i mean already it's astringent yeah yeah so to the early modern mine this is very effective you can see the smoke already gathering completely transformed the whole smell of the room in about seven seconds absolutely in 1665 more than a hundred thousand people died of the plague nathaniel hodges however survived but it certainly wouldn't have been his sweet smells that saved him so in the world of our ancestors elves demons and smells could all make you ill but there was one other major player in the health arena a supernatural being more powerful than anything else an entity that could make you mortally ill or grant miraculous cures in the middle ages if you woke up with some suspicious symptoms you first needed to ask yourself if you'd incurred the wrath of god [Music] disease was seen as a punishment because you'd sinned and the most obvious example of this was a sexually transmitted disease if i were a medieval man and i suspected i had such an illness my first port of call might well have been the church oh so i've come to see professor helen king for some divine insight i've got a bit of a problem i've got pimples i'm itching like crazy and the worst thing is that down below i've got this really bad discharge oh my goodness it's horrible what do i do about it it's not nice that's gonorrhea by the sound of it but the question is why have you got this now um well there was the taverner's wife so what you're saying is adultery i suppose so yeah i see this is sin back in the middle ages it was thought that god struck you with a disease not just as punishment but as a warning to make you change your ways so it would seem that my soul is a bit of a mess your soul is a mess and the only answer for you is repentance repentance required aspiring to the self-control of angels and resisting the base animalistic tendencies of beasts [Music] the angels are totally unlike the beasts angels don't do sex angels don't do eating and drinking angels don't do sleeping angels are above the physical all those things that we share with the beasts this angelic self-control meant fasting and all-night prayer vigils actions that ironically could make a sick body even weaker but there were even more extreme measures you could take against your sinning flesh you need to control that body so what do i do with it you've got to hit your flesh with it alright let's have a go in the 14th century when the black death struck processions of flagellants whipped themselves as they marched through london flogging the body that had physically committed the sin should atone for moral transgressions and as the sin was removed hopefully god would take the disease away too you're telling your flesh that your soul is in control of your body and that therefore you're nearer to the angels than you are to the animals [Music] [Music] but if people in the middle ages thought they'd sinned too much and god had given up on them there was one other place they could look for a cure they could turn to magic and some of the most dangerous and bizarre treatments ever known to man i'm about to find out just what was involved with medieval magical cures and how the sick thought they could use supernatural powers to give their symptoms to the dead i've been finding out what malicious paranormal entities our forefathers thought made them ill before science gave them the answers and now i want to discover what magic cures were on offer to treat their supernatural symptoms to appreciate what magic medicine had to offer our ancestors i first need to understand how disease was thought to spread back in the middle ages in medieval times when nothing was known about germs and bacteria people had a very different idea of how disease spread and what happened to you if you gave your illness to someone else helping me understand this idea are professor owen davis and dr pixie mckenna first pixie recaps how we know diseases spread today look at this chap here he's imagine he's got the disease the ball is the disease he passes that on to one of his mates all right he's coughed on this chap he's given him the disease but he still has the disease he then passes it on to another friend but he still has the disease in the modern day we believe you keep the disease yourself but you pass it on to another person as well so it keeps going round and round and round but our medieval ancestors had a very different idea of how disease could spread it was called transference and grasping this concept is key to understanding how they thought magic cures could work right so this is disease disease is limited the idea is it's it's not contagion if i've got this i've got the disease yeah if i get better he gets worse so i've lost her did he he goes to him i'm fine yeah so if he passes the disease onto somebody the disease is transferred this is the idea of transference so he hasn't got the disease anymore no just the one person so it goes on and if this guy passes it on he's got the disease so it's always the only one it never disappears it's always in the system so transference was the idea that when you transferred your disease to someone else it would physically pass out of your body and into theirs they would be ill and you would be as right as rain and there were a whole host of treatments that exploited this concept of transference pixie and owen are going to demonstrate medieval magic medicine on the ailments and public of today so william where where is this uh it's just so how would you have dealt with it in the middle ages well destroying extraordinary cures was to actually be stroked by the hand of a recently executed criminal uh we don't have an executed criminal what we do have is a peace trotter to represent a cold clammy hand and what would happen is that people would queue up after the person had been executed bringing them and they would ask the executioner to have the hand touched on the back on the neck like that on top of there stroking with a cold grammy hand [Music] the idea was that the cyst would in time pass from your back into the hand of the dead man he would then take it with him to hell [Music] how does that feel will you if i if i i didn't know what it was i think maybe people would pay money to do this in a massage parlor or something but but now that i know what it is it's a yes a bit creepy it is another option for the unscrupulous was to pass their ailment or affliction onto the living hello boys can i borrow you for a second come and sit down here on our uh consulting couch oh my god there's lots of you skateboards and everything well this is a biggie isn't it have you done anything to try and get rid of your warts uh pull them off stab it with a pen pull them off and stab it with a pen dabbing okay pulling it off how about you sandpaper sand oh their modern methods already seem pretty unsavory but back in the middle ages the growth factor would have been even higher with a magical transference treatment involving snails do it a few times make sure it gets nice and sticky on it this is this is transferring again the wart to the snail but then for the cure to work we have to do something to the snail i'll give it to you now and you put it in the bag in this bag the idea was to transfer the warts onto a snail and then pass them on to an unsuspecting passerby [Music] right so come with me this way now you just put it down somewhere [Music] whoever picked up the bag would supposedly end up with much more than just the snail the warts should be transferred onto them as well and as new warts grew on the person with the bag the original patient's skin should become wart free well that was the theory [Music] but transference wasn't a one-way street our ancestors not only believed they could transfer disease out of their own bodies into someone else they also thought they could transfer the health and vitality of fit people into themselves the most extreme case of transferring the vitality or life force of another creature into a human is recorded in an epic celtic oral tale that's over 2000 years old medical historian bob arnott is going to use this source to recreate what was an attempt to magically pass the strength of animals into a badly injured warrior bob what's the significance of this text this text tells us about seathean son of finton who went on a raid to his neighbors to rustle their cattle it's called the fake coolies raid here's the text and this explains his the story of him he was badly injured on his chariot season was trying to use his chariot to round up the cattle when he was speared by a member of the tribe that owned them his wounds were horrific all right yeah yeah and can you imagine if this is at speed of course yeah yeah because you've got potentially two clashing chariots or even maybe a foot soldier busting upwards yeah but if you can imagine some force whacking [Music] let's have a look see what we've got oh right it's a bit of an effort to get it out it's a very deep wound yeah and if you could you can imagine look how far it goes think of the organ damage yeah to the to the guts and the liver or the kidneys depends where it hit yeah that would have been for anybody who is perhaps weaker or smaller that would have killed them out right but of course the the text tells us that he was uh he survived that but needed healing from his doctor season was losing strength fast so what the doctor prescribed was to give him the power and vitality of a whole herd of cows and bulls surely this would save him but this transference was going to be a very bloody business indeed and all season's entourage would have to help his his followers slaughtered a whole herd of uh cows and bulls and they made a mixture of their blood the meat and the marrow you get from inside the bones here the meat we're using today in this experiment is meat that isn't fit for human consumption but of course back 2000 years ago it was quite a different story to slaughter a whole herd which was a vital part of the wealth of the community in order to save the life of this one individual would be like bathing in champagne it would be like bathing caviar this was a vital part of their economy and they did everything they could to heal their leader chuck it in then well the gory mess they were preparing wasn't a blood transfusion as we know it today it's thought it was an attempt to transfer a magical strength and power from slaughtered animals into a weak human but of course the most important thing is it is the magic behind it they believed it worked for the transference to take place season would have to lie in the bloody mixture for three days and three nights what that would have felt like i can hardly imagine unfortunately bob can what we're going to do tony is take experimental archaeology to a new height and in here we've got a mixture of blood and meat and more blood you want me to get in that i do indeed it is quite disgusting it really is the things we do to take forward the frontiers of knowledge more blood more blood i'm about to experience for myself just what a strong stomach you needed for ancient medical cures and i'll also be revealing the astonishing truth about why these mystical medicines may make far more rational sense than you might think i'm discovering what our ancestors thought caused disease before science came up with the answers and what bizarre treatments they believed could cure them [Music] now i'm going to experience the magical medicine of the celts for myself and see how a stomach churning mix of blood and guts was supposed to transfer the vitality and strength of cows and bulls into sea then one of their wounded warriors no not yet not yet i'm going to tie your chariot board to you i'm donning a piece of wood like the one that was used to keep seethan's disembowelled entrails in place oh and he was naked i on the other hand am wearing a nice protective suit because well i don't want to die just yet oh i tell you what those bones on the bottom are not great let's top you up let's get the full mixture going yeah i don't want it on my face no oh god i'll tell you what this suits leaking is it yeah all around my stomach oh i can feel it creeping all the way around me okay so i might find the cold clotting liquid deeply revolting but our warrior would have felt this was magic a magic transference of the strength and vitality of powerful beasts slowly soaking into him and one final bucket full and i'm hoping the text will help me feel some of that magic too and he was set in the tub of marrow and he began to soak in the tub full of marrow and the tub full of marrow went into him through his wounds and his gashes in his lacerations and in his many cuts certainly doing that it's getting right inside me it's doing you good it's the blood of life coming to heal you to bring you back to life to heal your wounds it clearly wouldn't have done you any good in our terms but in their terms the power of those cattle and the honor that our that our hero gained from being treated by his compatriots was quite quite incredible so i'd have been feeling like a hero being brought back to life again that's exactly what it was i don't you don't scientifically this mixture could only have made the injured warrior even worse but it's just possible that our ancestors belief in magical transference may have worked as an extreme form of placebo [Music] indeed every treatment that i've encountered on my journey no matter how bizarre or disturbing may have had some medical benefit if the patient believed in it to demonstrate how effective this power of belief can be even in today's scientific world dr pixie mckenna is going to play the role of a medieval healer with things like an ordinary cream she will claim is a powerful painkiller i'm going to test your response to pain so rather cleverly we've got two devices here which can give you a stimulus of pain just into your finger but before you do that we're going to give you pain relief on one and not on the other now you have the option of having a cream rub down to the area that's going to be painful so that'd be an anesthetic pain killing cream or you could even have an injection into the area uh cream cream no the cream is just a moisturizer and the injection people can also choose is nothing more than a blast of fresh air but the pain from the metal bar pressing on their fingers is very real finger on this side both hands will experience pain it just feels odd yeah it's pushing the bone down yeah but will the belief that the hand nearest to pixie has been treated be enough to make a difference if 10 was the worst pain how bad how bad would you describe the pain i'd say that was probably moving towards a seven eight okay and what about the one on my side that one's more like a five still okay this finger in comparison to this finger actually now they are saying that this this one is not as painful and this one's slightly more painful and the power of our belief in science is such that the needle-free fake injection works even better than the cream the needle-free probably was better it was better yep and it worked better for me work better for you yeah ever heard of a thing called placebo is it a placebo it certainly is so like nothing yeah it's just a cream it's just a cream so perhaps some of our ancestors magic medicine wasn't as naive as it might first appear what we use hand in hand with modern medicine is something from the medieval days and that's the placebo effect in years gone by it would have been called hocus pocus but actually we actively employ the placebo effect every single day in our clinics and the power of belief is still effective the more a patient believes in a cure the more effective it's going to be trust me but amazingly the efficacy of some of these superstitious treatments wasn't necessarily all in the mind the very first surgery performed to release demons trapped inside the skull paved the way for a high-tech procedure used to treat cerebral conditions today [Music] 22 year old samantha has a brain tumor that's causing severe epileptic seizures so doctors are going to remove part of her skull not to release demons but to cut out the tumor i've come to the national hospital for neurology and neurosurgery to meet andy mcavoy and see the operation for myself tony would you like to come join us thanks honey do you ever get a sense that what you're doing is really a continuum from what medical people have been doing for thousands of years absolutely right it's amazing the parallels you could draw with people and how they used to do um separation for people with epilepsy thinking they will possess them with spirits in the past so you're not expecting any evil spirits to come flying out today i don't think there'll be any escaping today but i hope there's a big brain tumor about to escape that would be my hope today anyway samantha has to be kept awake at all times to monitor cognition the reasons for the operation may have changed beyond recognition [Music] but in different forms this procedure has been carried out since the stone age [Music] okay put a bit more locally you do that i'll keep you off your drone luckily andrew isn't using flint blades the equipment he's got has been specially developed so it won't damage the brain his aim though is the same to remove a small section of skull [Music] [Applause] one of the advantages of this is that when it goes through the bone it automatically cuts out when it hits the jaw on the other side one of the great complications was the people plugging this into the brain with it when it went through on the other side but we don't have those problems anymore thank goodness after a grueling eight hours of surgery samantha's operation is a complete success what a privilege to be here in the 21st century when this miraculous operation takes place and isn't it extraordinary that that should be a direct descendant of procedures that were going on 2 000 even more years ago [Music] today mainstream medicine is very much a science with many diseases there's no doubt what causes them and treatments are based on proven clinical results but this is all relatively new before the 18th century very little was known about the true mechanics of illness and the workings of the human body the vast majority of our ancestors had to take a very different approach in the days before vaccines and antibiotics and x-rays there simply weren't many ways to diagnose illnesses let alone cure them superstition was often the best medicine on offer because at least it offered you a cause for your illness and if you had a cause however far-fetched you could try and find a solution and when you're ill are looking death in the face who wouldn't want to do something rather than nothing

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 35,579

Rating: 4.9322672 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, tony robinson, blood bath, absolute history, hidden killers, gods & monsters, stone age surgery, stone age documentary, ancient myths, early medicine, placebo effect experiment

Id: _9nglg6Ofwo

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021