wait i'm not dead

the power of soup How Vikings Used Onion Soup To Find Out If People Would Die Doctors used to have very primitive methods for diagnosing patients. For example, there was kickepathy, in which a doctor would just kick the patient hard in the stomach; if the patient yelled "ow," the doctor would conclude that they were likely still alive. On the battlefield, doctors would sometimes defer to a process known as locomotion: If the patient could get up and walk, fine, but if not, then they're as good as dead, there's no time look after them, we have to flee NOW. Jokes aside, our ancestors were at least able to examine injured parties to try to ascertain the extent of the damage. This failed when it came to internal injuries. X-rays and MRIs were generally unavailable. Mostly, they just had to look at the outside of the patient and guess what was going on beneath the surface. For the Vikings, if an arrow hit someone in the belly, the big question was whether it tore through all those organs in there. Possibly, a doctor could find out how deep the wound went by reaching in and poking around, but experience told them that that sort of probing often only made matters worse. So here's the method they invented for diagnosing the patient. They'd feed the wounded man some soup cooked with lots of onions. Then the doctor would bend down and smell the wound. This part was very unpleasant for the smeller, but while the wound always smelled foul, it sometimes also smelled of onions. When it did, that meant that the wound had sliced open the guts, letting the chemical tracer onion soup leak out and escape into the wound. The treatment in such cases? The Vikings had none. No, when the wound smelled of onions, that meant no one would waste any more time on this lost cause. They'd save their herbal remedies for someone else who actually stood a chance of recovering. They left the oniony man to die, but at least he'd got to enjoy a hot last meal. For more old medicine, check out: - [Ketchup Was the Trendiest Medicine Of The 1830s]( - [The U.S. President That Died With A Butt Full of Beef And Bourbon]( - [One Psychiatrist Treated Insanity With a Piano Made of Cats]( Top image: [Rainer Z/Wiki Commons]( Daily Digest [5 Bonkers Ways 'Independence Day' Was Almost A Giant Disaster]( By JM McNab / June 30th, 2022 [20 Movie Facts Celebrating the Fourth of July (Because FREEDOM!)]( By Talbert Gregson / June 30th, 2022 [The Bizarro (World) History of Superman]( By Amanda Mannen / June 30th, 2022 [Cracked's Eatin' Weird - 4 Ways Food And Fitness Culture Overcomplicate Things]( By Ivan Farkas / June 30th, 2022 [20 Obscure Facts That Came In The Nick Of Time]( By Andrea Meno / June 30th, 2022 [READ MORE]( [fb]( [tw]( [yt]( [Logomark_DIGITAL_Red_50X50-px] [insta png]( [tiktok png]( [ARTICLES]( | [PICTOFACTS]( | [Videos]( Literally media Ltd. 190 West St, Suite 17B, Brooklyn NY 11222 COPYRIGHT © 2005-2021 Cracked is published by Literally media Ltd. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](. ONE CRACKED FACT | [View in browser](