20 Disgusting Truths About What Brothel Doctors Actually Did to Treat Disease

Thanks for watching. If this brought back a memory or taught you something Hollywood never would, subscribe and share it with someone who needs to hear the truth about the real American frontier. The Medicine Was Worse Than the Disease: What Frontier Brothel Doctors Really Did In the summer of 1870, St. Louis did something no American city had tried. It legalized prostitution, put hundreds of women on a police register, and required them to see a doctor every single week. Upriver in Omaha, a young woman named Josie Washburn was living that same life, and decades later she wrote it all down in a book no publisher would touch. This documentary follows twenty documented truths about how frontier doctors examined, treated, licensed, and controlled the women of the brothels and cribs, from Civil War Nashville to the mining camps of Arizona. It draws on police registers, coroner's records, period medical treatises, and the words of the women themselves. It also asks why so little of this story survives, and why the westerns you grew up with left all of it out. The Science Behind It Before the 1900s, doctors had no reliable way to test for syphilis or gonorrhea, and no true way to cure either one. Medicine worked by trial, habit, and the authority of old textbooks. The remedies of the day included tree resins, peppers, caustic silver salts, opium preparations, and the same harsh antiseptics used to scrub surgical instruments. Many of them treated symptoms rather than infection, and several were toxic in their own right. Their side effects on the mouth, skin, stomach, and nervous system are well documented in nineteenth-century medical journals. This video explains how those treatments worked chemically, what they actually did inside the body, and why physicians trusted them. It traces the gap between what nineteenth-century doctors believed and what modern medicine now understands, and the decades it took for real diagnostics and cures to arrive. Sources and Further R