8 Seriously Bizarre Scientific Theories From History

2. Babylonian Skull Cure

For the Ancient Babylonians (and, frankly, most people before the development of germ theory), illness, disease and disaster were all caused by bad spirits. It follows logically, therefore, that to prevent them, you needed to scare the bad spirits away.

For example, if a person found that they tended to grind their teeth in their sleep, causing all sorts of aches and pains when awake, it was thought that they might have the ghost of a dead family member trying to contact them (or perhaps speak through them?) in the night.

The cure? Well, according to the ancient texts, the best thing to do is to sleep next to a human skull for a week.

For the maximum impact, patients were also recommended to kiss and lick the skull before they went to bed, presumably showing those dead guys that you can be just as creepy as them.

To be fair, this cure probably did stop you from grinding your teeth in your sleep, but mainly because you were laying wide awake all night, scared rigid by the toothy grin of your excarnated bedfellow.