These Rare, Distressing, Historical Photos Will Show You Just How Dangerous And Totally Wild The Medical World Used To Be Back In The Day

It feels like every year, there are breakthroughs in the medical field that continue to advance medicine. Although we can still make greater strides toward a universal healthcare system stateside, I bet you'd feel a lot more comfortable in a hospital today than, say, 100 years ago.

Here are 35 disturbing medical photos from the past that will have you thankful that you are living in the present:

Disclaimer: Some of these photos contain graphic medical imagery, including stillbirth pregnancies. Viewer discretion is advised.

1. For comparison with the first operating room photo, here is a 1900 photograph of an operating theater in Paris, France, with two nurses. A big difference from modern-day operating rooms. Notice the lack of equipment and, obviously, tech.

2. This photo from the 1850s depicts a man being prodded with what is titled "Mechanism of Human Physiognomy." This method was intended to study the systematic correspondence between psychological characteristics and facial features or body structure. This outdated method was discredited by modern science.

3. This is Dr. George Tartikoff, a former Army doctor, holding a baby upside down by the legs minutes after delivery. This was done to use gravity to drain fluid from their airways and even stimulate the first breath. Ironically, it doesn't take rocket science to see the dangers to the baby's neck and brain. This practice is now viewed as outdated.

4. Check out this 1930s nurse working on a rack of sterilized recycled rubber gloves. You read that right: recycled. Ew. When you're watching your favorite hospital drama, count how many times they chuck their gloves in the trash.

5. This photo from 1946 shows a doctor drilling into a patient's skull before performing a lobotomy.

6. Here is Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II performing a lobotomy using an ice-pick-like instrument. The tool is inserted under the patient's upper eyelid, and then the doctor cuts nerve connections in the front part of the brain.

7. This photo from the 1930s shows a woman during a hydrotherapy arm bath. I'm claustrophobic just looking at it. In the 19th century, inhumane practices like "water cures" and "tanking" were used in psychiatric asylums. While some water methods were used under the guise of therapy, methods like "tanking" were used intentionally to torture unruly patients, which shows that some medical practices have incredibly dark origins.

8. If you wanted a photo of "extreme curative measures," here is a photo of tuberculosis patients being treated outdoors in the snow at a Nottinghamshire hospital. They would spend their days lying on iron bedsteads in the open air, no matter how extreme the winter temperatures were.

9. Here is famed beautician Max Factor adjusting a beauty micrometer, or a "beauty microcalibrator," on a client's head. It looks a lot worse than it is, but it identifies areas of a person's face for proper makeup application. Imagine throwing on this helmet before you go out on a Friday night. For something meant to be a beauty microcalibrator, it looks like something straight out of a Blumhouse horror movie.

10. This poor baby from the 1940s suffers from infantile paralysis (aka polio) and is having treatment in an "iron lung." All the baby's toys surrounding it are both comforting and eerie. Thankfully, modern mechanical ventilators have replaced the iron lung.

11. Here's a woman wearing a flu mask during the Spanish flu epidemic. The epidemic killed an estimated 50 to 100 million worldwide between 1918 and 1920.

12. An elderly prisoner from 1869 struggles against the restraint chair in which he is held by his wrists and neck. Why include a prison photo? Hospitals have made great strides in both soft restraints and less early cuffs, which are now used universally.

13. Here is a sleeping area for psychiatric asylum patients. Again, my claustrophobia would have me breaking out of those windows and fleeing for the hills.

14. Here is an engraving showing the tools and steps of an outdated 1800s operation called trephination, or better known as trepanning. This surgical practice involved drilling, scraping, or cutting a hole into the human skull. Craniotomy is the closest practice today, but it is way less intense than the scalping done in a trepanning operation.

15. Did your class photo include a disemboweled cadaver? These 1890s Turkish medical students and faculty members are pictured with a real corpse. I'm guessing those are also real human bones, organs, and skeletons pictured with them.

16. This is a 1896 photo of an unvaccinated smallpox patient named George Steel, taken a day after the worst stage of the deadly disease. Steel survived and was discharged thanks to the same doctors who probably spent time warning men like Steel to get vaccinated. A simple PSA: Listen to doctors and get vaccinated.

17. A patient sits awkwardly during a hot needle treatment. Odds were that the man was strapped underneath that chair-like shirt. Needle treatments have become a lot less intense.

19. This is Mr. Kenneth Evans, who suffers from poliomyelitis and lives inside an iron lung at an isolation hospital. The hospital's technology allowed Evans to read books on microfilm, using his chin to turn the pages.

20. This 1900 photograph shows two amputees with their legs covered in mud as part of a treatment. In this case, doctors would take the amputees outside and cover their lower halves in mud; this was meant to relax the muscles and relieve pain, while improving tissue health around the stump for a better shape for any potential prosthetic leg or device. Mud therapy is now called pelotherapy. The treatment is actually still used, but more so for spa treatment than to help amputees.

21. This is a "Shock Room" from 1949. The radiant heat bath suspended above the table can be lowered when required for treatment. As scary as this may look to people with a fear of hospitals, a "Shock Room" is simply what we now know as the trauma room.

22. Just a normal photo of nurses, right? Wrong. What looks like a laundry basket is actually an old-school NICU incubator. This 1949 photograph shows a container holding a baby, with the nurse monitoring the pressure from an oxygen cylinder that keeps the baby girl alive.

23. Here is a 1947 photo of a nurse and a volunteer putting an oxygen tent over a baby's cot. That poor baby does not realize that what looks like an impromptu camping trip is actually saving their life.

24. Here is a late-19th-century photo of a brain taken at a psychiatric hospital.

25. This is what tuberculosis of the skin can do to someone.

26. Here is a large growth on a patient's knee from the late 19th century. What is so disturbing isn't the defect, but the fact that this was taken inside a psychiatric hospital. It makes you wonder how many people were misdiagnosed and shipped off to facilities for what would today be acknowledged as birth defects.

27. Patient Carolyn Radnall sits in bed, connected to an artificial kidney machine, while her husband, Peter, switches it on. This was actually the first machine in Britain that could be used at home, developed by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and the firm of Joseph Lucas Ltd. Things may seem uneasy and disturbing, but this is an example of medical strides that helped pave the way for today's field of medicine.

28. A medical drawing from 1905 that shows a 3-branched auvard instrument and the extraction of a fetus-like cranium.

29. Here is a young child with rotten teeth. Along with medical advances, dentistry has come a long way since the late 19th century.

31. Here are human hands and arms infected with tuberculosis verrucosa cutis.

32. Pictured is a patient sitting in a "tranquilizing chair." This was purely a full restraint device, but it was believed that by strapping patients in and confining their heads in a large bucket-like helmet, it would reduce blood flow to the brain. As horrifying a device as it is, Dr. Benjamin Rush, known as the father of American psychiatry, invented it in 1810. Like many on this list, it has been completely replaced by humane psychological care.

33. Here is a photograph of a woman undergoing treatment for mental illness in 19th-century Germany. No words for this disgusting treatment.

34. This 1905 drawing shows the removal of the placenta from the birth canal by a "rope-like twisting of the membranes." It's amazing and disturbing how much has changed, but the human body is still the human body. While childbirth practices have changed over the years, obstetric care still needs improvement for women today.

35. And lastly, look away! This photo, taken in 1865, shows the displacement of part of the iris during eye surgery.

Do you know any disturbing medical facts that haunt you just thinking about them? Share them in the comments or in the anonymous form below!