20 Odd Sleep Remedies People Once Swore By

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin distrusted taking a cold-water bath because he believed that it shocked the nervous system. So, instead of jumping into a tub full of frigid water, Franklin sat naked for 30 to 60 minutes before open windows in London and Philadelphia in order to calm himself down each morning. I suppose clothes were also optional in the pursuit of a good night’s sleep. He referred to the practice as the “air bath” in his letters written in 1768. Founding Father John Adams once argued with him about sharing an inn room with the window open, unconvinced by Franklin’s fresh-air theories.

In 1849, pharmacists Jeremiah Curtis and Benjamin Perkins introduced Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a patent medicine sold without a prescription and derived from a nurse’s recipe. Each fluid ounce contained 65 milligrams of morphine in addition to alcohol and was sold for soothing fussy babies. There were no drug regulations at this time, so the syrup was completely legal, resulting in infant dependency and deaths from respiratory depression that continued until the American Medical Association declared it dangerous in 1911.

During the 1840s to 1860s, novelist Charles Dickens was a victim of chronic insomnia. Dickens firmly believed that his insomnia could be cured by sleeping in alignment with the magnetic currents of the earth, because it would relieve congestion in the brain. In fact, he always kept a pocket compass when he traveled to ensure that his bed was always aligned with the true magnetic north. That’s considerably more commitment to a bedtime routine than most of us manage. This theory was based on Mesmerism, the popular Victorian belief in a magnetic “fluid” that ran through the body.

Chemists produced chloral hydrate in 1832, and doctors began using it to induce sleep in 1869, making it the first synthetic sedative. The dose required to knock someone out wasn’t much higher than a lethal dose, and chronic use led to addiction and stomach damage. Added to drinks, it later became associated with the term “Mickey Finn,” a drink secretly spiked to incapacitate someone. But sleep brought on by chloral hydrate was not genuine sleep.

Healers in ancient Rome and Elizabethan England thought that a human could absorb the traits of an animal by touching it. Since the edible dormouse sleeps the whole winter away, they would render its fat and rub it on the soles of people with insomnia, hoping they’d get some of the sleeping animal’s lethargy. But no hormone or trait can penetrate the skin like that. It was just another example of sympathetic magic, the notion that like causes like.

Researcher Stéphan Leduc pioneered high-current electro-anesthesia, using electricity to produce unconsciousness, in animals in 1902. By 1947, Soviet researchers turned the idea into a so-called “electrosleep” therapy. They fitted patients with rubber electrode goggles over closed eyelids and placed an electrode on the mastoid bone behind the ear. Microcurrent pulses of very low frequency were passed through the patient’s brain to induce sleep. It was nothing like electroconvulsive therapy’s high voltage, and its results remain disputed.

Galenic medicine, the ancient belief in a balance between four fluids in the body, was widely adopted by Tudor doctors. Insomnia was thought to result from an overheated brain, so doctors would apply slices of cold, raw apple or apple poultices to the top of the head or the forehead to cool the brain and extract the heat. A cold apple was doing an impressive amount of theoretical work here. This was theory, not thermodynamics.

In the mid-19th century, doctors ascribed insomnia to “cerebral hyperemia,” which refers to excessive amounts of blood rushing to the head, and attempted to cure it by applying medicinal leeches to the patient’s temple or by opening veins to let blood out, which would reduce blood pressure and induce a state of faintness and drowsiness. They believed they were helping the patient sleep. By the 1860s, orthodox medicine had abandoned the use of leeches.

Dried cowpats were hung above bedheads in 18th-century England’s East Anglian fens, a marshy region in eastern England, to deter mosquitoes and keep damp marsh vapors at bay, then thought to be responsible for spreading disease as miasma, or bad air. It was a local folk practice, says historian A. Roger Ekirch, not something drawn from Hannah Glasse’s celebrated domestic handbook, published in 1760, which, in fact, advised cleansing with herbs.

The chemists Emil Fischer and Josef von Mering synthesized barbital in 1903, which was marketed under the brand name Veronal. It spawned decades of barbiturate sleeping pills that remained a popular sleep aid for people with insomnia through the 1950s. People developed tolerance very quickly and needed more and more of them. Many became addicted, many had potentially deadly seizures after stopping, and many overdosed. This trifecta of risks made barbiturates deadly for decades.

In 1820, dried milky sap from wild lettuce was first standardized in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the official drug reference book of the United States, and marketed as “lettuce opium.” Although it looked like opium sap, it contained no actual opiate alkaloids, just mild sedatives called sesquiterpene lactones, and as a remedy for severe insomnia, it was not much good.

In the 1880s and throughout the 1910s, many insomnia sufferers spent their nights in electrotherapy clinics where they lay in warm bathtubs lined with positive and negative electrodes. A weak “faradic” (alternating) current would be sent through the bath, supposedly to relax the body by toning the over-stimulated nerves. Electrified bathwater sounds like precisely the opposite of relaxing, but voltages were kept low and tightly controlled to avoid the risk of electrocution.

In his 1576 autobiography De Vita Propria, Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano, a physician, mathematician, and writer, describes a technique for curing insomnia that he repeated four times a year. He rubbed himself with bear’s fat mixed with ointment of poplar buds and oil of water lilies, anointing exactly 17 specific points on his body, including his soles, heels, thighs, temples, and spine. Under the Galenic system, the purpose of the rubbing was to cool down his internal heat.

Bromide salts were introduced as sedatives in the 1850s, calming the central nervous system, and remained in tonics until the 1940s. Bromides were excreted from the body very slowly, which meant that a patient taking them regularly would build them up in their system. This led to chronic bromide poisoning called “bromism,” characterized by violent acne-like skin lesions, delirium, loss of memory, and even psychosis. It was not a safe mineral remedy.

The wet sheet pack was popularized by hydrotherapy proponent Vincent Priessnitz in the 1830s and was still used in sleep-rest clinics known as sanatoriums in the 1940s. The insomniac would be undressed, tightly wrapped in cold, wet sheets, then covered with layers of dry wool blankets. The trapped water would warm into a layer of steam, dilating blood vessels and slowing the heart rate, prompting deep drowsiness.

Between 1900 and the mid-1950s, psychiatric hospitals treated severe cases of agitated insomnia by suspending patients in canvas hammocks within baths of constantly moving water held at body temperature. Left submerged from 8 to 24 hours (and sometimes longer), they were effectively sedated without drugs. Alienists (as psychiatrists were then known) considered this preferable to heavy sedation. Eight hours of sleep is one thing. Spending the entire eight hours suspended in a bath is another. By the mid-1950s, the advent of antipsychotic drugs had led to its disappearance.

In the late 1700s, pillows stuffed with dried hop cones, the same ingredient that flavors beer, became popular for their mild sedative effects. A physician recommended a pillow of hops for King George III, the British monarch at the time, in the late 1780s during an episode of extreme agitation and again in 1801. The king reportedly found some relief from his agitation, though his underlying condition, which today could be considered either porphyria or bipolar disorder, remained undiagnosed and untreated.

Between the 9th and 16th centuries, European physicians prepared a concoction called dwale by soaking sea sponges in the boiled liquids of poppies, mandrake root, deadly nightshade, and hemlock. Rehydrated with hot water and held over a patient’s nose before surgery, it induced unconsciousness. Because no one controlled the concentration of alkaloids, the potent chemical compounds in the plants, the dangerous herbal anesthetic often resulted in death from asphyxiation or a lifelong coma.

Once chloroform and ether became available for surgical purposes in the 1840s, both of these volatile solvents were sold by apothecaries, the pharmacists of the time, without a prescription. Insomniacs in despair would sprinkle chloroform on a cloth and hold it over their face, thus knocking themselves out. If the patient fell asleep and the chloroform-soaked cloth continued to cover their nose and mouth, the dosage might well become lethal. It was never the equivalent of natural sleep.

Sleeping pads containing real radium-226 and thorium isotopes were sold in the 1910s and the early 1930s. Insomniacs were instructed to put these glowing radioactive pads under their pillow or sheet, with advertising suggesting that gamma radiation invigorated tired nerves. Yes, the thing beneath the pillow was deliberately radioactive. The best years of sales for these products seem to have been between 1915 and 1930; they stopped selling them when it became clear that radiation sickness, including bone rot and cancer, could result from excessive exposure.

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