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When you read this and realize that someone must have thought to measure how many millimetres of mercury a virgin female chicken's anus (cloaca) can suck? https://t.co/a6mIindzxN

I regret trying to look that up.https://t.co/T4bSRoaUEK

Whoa, there are records of using chickens all the way back to a french surgeon (Henri de Mondeville) from the 1200s, and possibly even as far back as Galen. This seems to be tied with a legitimate use of 'cupping'.https://t.co/Zu11n66Oq9How many chickens? Many. https://t.co/5wN3echPvu


"if the patient has not improved, slaughter a young pigeon, slit its abdomen and put it on the site of the bite. When the heat diminishes, apply another one. If no pigeons are available, apply young chickens, roosters, hens or a weasel."hmm

Ok, fine, I'll start looking up the traditions around applying mice to teeth aches in ancient Egypt & exploring mice paste poultices.I bet that what we're seeing w/ weasels is some kind of neutralization + attenuation of wound healing meant to prevent an immune system response.

Turns out belief in urine strengthening gums may be founded on truth. Fermented urine turns to ammonia. Ammonia is the main method of action attributed to xylitol's prevention of tooth decay / gum disease. How about them apples.https://t.co/myrnlMmXlWhttps://t.co/SpNd1Jto5Z

I'm just guessing, but doing something to prevent rapid cytokine response by limiting inflammation and resulting cascade might be more beneficial when you've got a snake bite. Any secondary infection would still be less deadly than the literal venom.

Similarly, if applying a warm fresh dead weasle is preventing coagulation and other properties of puncture wounds, that would make it way easier to continue to procure blood flow and drain the venom.The blood loss alone could put the person into a temporary hibernation state.

I want to know more details about how to prepare the animal. Clearly a chicken cloaca is unsanitary, but I'd be curious if the fresh weasel/mice was applied as is, or if they were quickly gutted to avoid fecal contamination. May have been unspoken standard operating procedure?

All the modern writings on the topic of applying animal carcuses to a wound aren't very specific. Some say "paste" some say "cut in half", but I get the impression that we're not really seeing the full picture of what what was actually being done.

Do you think chicken cloacas smell like bird shit?What if you feed them special herbs and keep them healthy, maybe it smells like something else?https://t.co/jkFoMtQH3J

What if it wasn't the act of sucking the venom out with a chicken's cloaca, but the shit itself? And a bunch of doctors were just doing it wrong thru an easy to make misinterpretation/misunderstanding?https://t.co/17BxDIDWUK

This probably wont work with modern chickens at all. Especially if the peptides responsible for keeping them safe from snake bites are driven by gut microbes. https://t.co/xrPr3MnnMs