9 Disgusting Medical Treatments That Might Just Save Your Life

9. The Dark Age Treatment For MRSA

We generally like to think that we're much smarter than all those idiots back in The Olden Days, particularly when it comes to medicine. However, nestled in between the the frog-paste throat lozenges and the blood-letting instruction manual might just be an incredibly effective treatment for one of the most dreaded superbugs of the modern era: MRSA.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is, as the name suggests, resistant to Methicillin and a number of other penicillins, but the bug is actually the same one that causes eye infections such as stys. Scientists were therefore dumbfounded when the found that an Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections outperformed modern antibiotics in combating the deadly disease.

The remedy includes wine, garlic, and bile from a cow’s stomach and is over a thousand years old. The individual ingredients don't appear to have any effect on the bacteria, but when combined according to the instructions of an ancient medical text, they killed up to 90% of MRSA bacteria in infected mice.

This is the original recipe if you fancy whipping one up at home (for the love of god, don't do that):

“Work and eye salve for a wen, take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with a leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time apply with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.”