Erin Allman-Updike

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

But hopefully I've given you a small taste of the variations on this theme.

And I think that there are two main takeaways with this foray into ancient burn treatment.

First, there are a lot of treatments, which suggests, of course, that this was a problem encountered frequently enough to keep trying new things.

Right.

And everywhere.

So everyone's got their own version of a treatment.

Everyone's got their own version.

And because there was no clearly single reliable remedy, people were constantly inventing new recipes.

Right.

And second, by and large, treatments were topical, aimed at promoting healing and providing relief.

And when you think of these in comparison to the full-scale, multi-specialty approach that we use today, it's barely a drop in the bucket.

I mean, they were doing the best that they could with the knowledge that they had.

And as that knowledge grew, so did their approaches, but not necessarily with success.

There were limitations for thousands of years.

By the Middle Ages, the list of options for treating a burn had grown tremendously.

So sure, still plenty of people were opting for raw onion slices, which remained popular for a really long time, actually, with Ambrose Paré employing onions and salt allegedly effectively in the 16th century.

But there was one sizable shift in focus over that time, and that was sort of towards temperature.

So physicians found that topical treatments that invoked a cooling sensation or were themselves cooling, like melted snow, provided relief to those with burns, especially with superficial burns.