Officially we Britons have been Christian for more than 1,500 years,
but scratch the surface and you'll find our ancestors
believed in far more than Christ and the cross.
Pagan gods, witches, demons, evil spirits,
were all proclaimed as terrifying fact.
Now I want to uncover what beliefs and fears really built Britain.
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 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 tell you what, this suit's leaking.
Come on, I need your help now.
Nowadays, if you've got a serious medical issue,
a quick phone call will get a well-trained team
who will normally know what the problem is
and how to deal with it.
But you don't have to go back too far 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 1,500 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 Alaric Hall,
to find out more about the phenomenon called elf shot.
What was an elf?
They looked a lot like normal people,
if you ever saw one, which would 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 any more.
The idea of being made ill by external forces
and entities attacking the body was so widespread among our ancestors
it's had a lasting effect on medical terminology.
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.
It 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,
before the Romans, before the Anglo-Saxons,
People in England were kind of picking these up, round here,
round West Stow - 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 it would be associated with supernatural beings,
your kind of neighbours that you never see, uh, 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 elves?
The most mild-sounding seems to be skin ailments,
we don't know quite what, rashes maybe.
We know that they caused sort of sharp violent, internal pains
and elves were associated with causing things
that kind of messed with your state of mind.
Um, 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.
CHANTING IN ANCIENT TONGUE
"Out little spear, if it should be here within...
"I will send another back...
CHANTING IN ANCIENT TONGUE
"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 you didn't cut me.
There's good old knifey feel about that as it goes on.
It's actually 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.
These aren't just something that's out there and completely unassailable,
you can actually do something about this threat.
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 matter.
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 2,000 years ago, in Roman 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 Aldhouse-Green
has tracked down the skull of a 20-year-old woman,
from the Roman period, in the second century AD,
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-bladed 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 tumour, 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.
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 is so dangerous for the patient?
Flint-napper extraordinaire John Lord is going to show me
what tools would've 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 flint.
It won't hurt your finger, you'll just knock it out the way.
And away...
Really, flick of the wrist.
- You've done it. - Wa-ay!
I've got two little blades here, haven't I?
That's a beauty.
Look at that!
Neolithic people were the first farmers in Britain.
Even six thousand years ago
they were skilled manufacturers of farming tools,
and it seems surgical equipment.
We're actually making a mechanised implement here.
One of the first machines of the past.
With our flint blade 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 un-anaesthetised 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 had never occurred to me you would create a flap
so you could put the flap back afterwards.
- Yeah. Yeah. - Easily stitched up and repaired.
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,
while 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 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?
Our 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 trepanning or trephining
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 were 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.
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.
When the plague returned to London in 1665,
killing tens of thousands of people,
foul odours 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 disease is 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 explanation for what the plague was was this theory of miasma,
that 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 breath in too hard one might go up my nose.
(RETCHING)
- What the early... - Sorry.
In the 17th century, you're a dead man now.
You've sniffed infected...
In the 21st century, I'm a dead man now!
'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.
This 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.
You pack that up with herbs and 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.
Let's just road test whether it works.
Get your beak into that meat.
Nice?
I can actually inhale without gagging
because I've got this great wall of rosemary and thyme.
Much, much better.
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 odours 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 house would have rotted, it would have stank.
To get rid of one set of bad odours,
you have to use even more powerful ones.
Vinegar. Bit of vinegar.
Draping great sheets.
Bit of air, bit of brutal perfume cleaning it all out.
Phoaw. Smell of vinegar!
It's pretty grim!
If vinegar wasn't enough to eradicate diabolic foul smells,
some doctors would try an even more powerful deodoriser -
gunpowder.
They used explosives?
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.
Oh, it's like a firework, isn't it?
You see how thick this stuff is though?
I maen, already... it's astringent.
Yeah, yeah.
So,
to the early modern mind, this was very effective,
you can see the smoke already gathering.
Completely transformed the whole smell of the room
in about seven seconds.
In 1665, more than 100,000 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.
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.
'So I've come to see professor Helen King for some divine insight.'
Uh, 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 gonorrhoea by the sound of it.
But the question is why have you got this now?
Uh...
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.
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 of 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.
All right, 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.
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, therefore, you're nearer to the angels than you are to the animals.
But if people in the Middle Ages thought they had 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 Doctor Pixie McKenna.
First Pixie recaps how we know disease is spread today.
Look at this chap here.
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 that it's not contagion.
If I've got this, I've got the disease, if I get better...
..he gets worse.
So I've lost the disease, but it goes to him, I'm fine.
Yeah. So if he passes the disease on to somebody,
the disease is transferred.
This is the idea of transference.
- So he hasn't got the disease? - No, just the one person,
and so it goes on.
And if this guy passes it on?
He's got the disease. So it goes on...
So always one person has got it?
It never disappears - it's always in the system.
Yeah.
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, cyst?
It's just over here.
Can I have, can I have a look?
So how would you have dealt with it in the Middle Ages?
Well, one of the extraordinary cures
was to actually be stroked by the hand of a recently executed criminal,
but we don't have an executed criminal, but we do have
a pig's trotter
to represent a cold clammy hand,
and 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 it with a cold clammy hand.
Yeah, very cold.
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.
How does that feel, William?
If I, if I didn't know what it was,
I think maybe people would pay money to do this
in a massage parlour of some sort.
But now that I know what it is, uh yes, uh.
A bit creepy?
It is.
Another option for the unscrupulous
was to pass their ailment or affliction on to the living.
Hello, boys.
- Can I borrow you for a second? - Yeah, sure.
Come and sit down here on our consulting couch.
My God, there's lots of you. Skateboards and everything.
Well, this is a biggy, isn't it?
Have you done anything to try and get rid of your wart?
Uh, pull them off, stab it with a pen.
Pull them off and stab it with a pen.
Stabbing, OK. Pulling it off.
How about you?
Uh, sand paper.
Sand... oh, that's disgusting.
That's a new one.
Their modern methods already seem pretty unsavoury,
but back in the Middle Ages
the gross factor would have been even higher,
with a magical transference treatment involving snails.
If I give that to you, and what you've got to do
is rub it on your wart.
Uh, yeah.
Do it a few times, so it gets nice and sticky.
This is transferring again, the wart to the snail,
but then for the cure to work
we have to do something to the snail.
Put it in the bag.
Put it in this bag.
The idea was to transfer the warts on to a snail
and then pass them on to an unsuspecting passer-by.
Right, so come with me,
this way.
Now you just put it down somewhere.
Whoever picked up the bag
would supposedly end up with much more than just the snail.
The warts should be transferred on to 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.
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 2,000 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 Ceithern, son of Fintan,
who went on a raid to his neighbours, to rustle their cattle.
It's called the Cooley's raid.
Here's the text and...
..this explains his, the story of him.
He was badly injured on his chariot.
Ceithern 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.'
- Right, yeah? - Yeah, yeah.
- And if you can imagine, this is at speed of course. - Yeah. Yeah.
Because you've got potentially two clashing chariots, or even maybe
- ..a foot soldier thrusting upwards. - Yeah.
But if you can imagine some force whacking in there.
Let's have a look and see what we've got.
Oh!... It's a bit of an effort to get it out.
It's a very deep wound and you could imagine.
Yeah, look how far it goes.
If you think of the organ damage, to the guts and the liver,
or possibly the kidneys. Depends where it hit.
For anybody who was perhaps weaker or smaller,
that would have killed them outright.
But of course the text tells us
that he survived that,
but needed healing from his doctor.
Ceithern 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 Ceithern's entourage would have to help.
His followers
slaughtered a whole herd of 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 2,000 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,
it would be like bathing in champagne,
it would be like bathing in caviar.
This was a vital part of their economy,
and they did everything they could to heal their leader.
Chuck it in, then.
'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.'
Of course the most important thing is the magic behind it.
They believed it worked.
'For the transference to take place,
'Ceithern 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.
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 Ceithern,
one of their wounded warriors.
Shall I go in now?
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
'Ceithern'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.'
(LAUGHS)
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, sorry.
Oh, God. I tell you what, this suit's leaking.
- Is it? - Yeah, all around my stomach. Oh...
Oh, I can feel it creeping all the way around me.
Oh!
OK, 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 bucketful. - Oh!
'I'm hoping the text will help me feel some of that magic too.'
That 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
and his lacerations and in his many cuts.
It's 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 honour 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.'
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,
Doctor Pixie McKenna is going to play the role of a medieval healer,
with things like an ordinary cream
she will claim is a powerful pain killer.
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 rubbed onto the area that's going to be painful -
so that would be an anaesthetic pain-killing cream -
or you can even have an injection into the area.
Uh, cream.
Cream? OK. Now...
The cream is just a moisturiser
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.
The same with the 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 ten was the worst pain, how bad would you describe the pain?
I'd say that was probably moving towards a seven, eight.
OK, and what about the one on my side?
That one's more like a five still.
OK, this finger in comparison to this finger?
Actually now that you're saying that, this one,
it's not as painful and this one is 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.
Was better?
It worked better for me.
- It worked better for you? - Yeah.
Ever heard of a thing called placebo?
- Is it a placebo? - It certainly is.
- Is it 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 hi-tech procedure
used to treat cerebral conditions today.
22-year-old Samantha has a brain tumour
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 tumour.
I've come to the National Hospital For Neurology And Neurosurgery
to meet Andy McEvoy and see the operation for myself.
- Tony, would you like to come and join us? - Thanks, Andy.
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
and how they used to do trepanations for people with epilepsy
thinking they were possessed and with spirits.
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 tumour 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,
but in different forms,
this procedure has been carried out since the Stone Age.
Ow, ow, ow.
OK, I'll put a bit more local in for you.
Yeah, it's me.
No, if you do that I'll kick you off your trolley!
(THEY LAUGH)
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.
Tony, one of the advantages of this is that when it goes through the bone
it automatically cuts out when it hits the dura on the other side.
One of the great complications was people plunged into the brain with it
when it went through on the other side,
but we don't have those problems any more, thank goodness.
'After a gruelling 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?
'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,
or looking death in the face,
who wouldn't want to do something rather than nothing?
Next week - witches.
I'll be finding out
why our ancestors were convinced black magic was very real.
They were a very feared set of people.
But who was thought to be practising the dark arts?
The woman next door to you could be a witch.
The woman in your own house could be a witch.
And what happened if you were accused of being in league
with the devil?
You'd be able to hear yourself burning.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd