Healthcare Before the 1920's

Before the 1920's, there were some various techniques of healthcare that in today's time might have seen as mediocre to just plain cruel. People back then were forced to use the resources and materials that were at hand, and these were often ineffective or tended to make things worse for the patient. Hospitals were rarely used back in those days, and most medical treatment was performed by women on their own family members in their own house. The treatments they used mostly just succeeded in making the patient comfortable enough and let their own body fight whatever illness they had. This was considered the best treatment, since hospitals were few and far between and it usually made things worse to try to travel with the sick person all the way to one. Also, doctors back then did not know much about how to fight various diseases, so most people considered going to the hospital a death sentence. They thought that they would rather die in the comfort of their own home surrounded by their loved ones rather than in a nasty, dirty hospital with doctors that did not know at all what they were doing for the most part. There were few women doctors, if any at all, and men did not know how to make the patients more comfortable by providing certain things like baths and healthy food. Male doctors often overlooked these little things that women who were used to dealing with these things would have remembered. Most of the practices that doctors used only made things worse, and few patients ever recovered fully from their stay at the hospital. Luckily, as the years passed, technology and therefore medicine and medical practices began to improve slowly, and the hospital began to start becoming not so much of a death sentence as it was once viewed as.