Colt did the stuff no favors with his snake-oil mercantilism. Because of its circus origins, anyone who suggested that this magic gas could have actual medical value was laughed out of the room. That was until 1846, when a dentist named William Morton put a patient under using nitrous oxide at Massachusetts General Hospital and removed a tumor from the patient's neck. Up to that point, surgery patients had been put under with generous doses of alcohol or opium and on occasion were literally beaten unconscious. When the patient didn't howl in pain, Morton knew he was on to something. And so did everyone watching from the audience stands, because the carnival aspect of medicine didn't going away until much, much later.

H.B. Hall
Not pictured: The unicycle-riding bear who juggled the discarded tumor.

To wit, the operating theater at Massachusetts General Hospital wasn't even called "the operating theater at Massachusetts General Hospital." It was known as the Ether Dome. Curious onlookers (who were probably also high on ether) could come in and watch all sorts of surgeries being performed, including amputations done by Robert Liston, who was known for his ability to saw off limbs in under three minutes. This was a big draw, because television had not yet been invented, and everyone in the middle- to upper-class was getting high off of medical sedatives all the time.

This is for fighting and for fun.

It's no surprise that there was heavy drug use during the Vietnam war. Being in the center of a brutal conflict seemingly without end while surrounded on all sides by naturally growing pot and heroin will do that to you. But it was a little trickier to get your hands on the paraphernalia with which to get high. That video shows a bunch of U.S. soldiers putting their mouths to the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun (which they've named Ralph), literally shotgunning some sweet Vietnamese kush. The footage was taken by a documentary crew in 1970, and it became so popular back in the States that 15 years later Oliver Stone paid homage to it by including a very similar scene in Platoon:

But as our hippie grandparents have demonstrated, weed won't exactly kill you. C-4, on the other hand, is pretty famous for doing exactly that. Because of rumors that nibbling on C-4 produced the same kind of high as huffing ethanol gas, some soldiers decided that eating plastic explosives was a good idea. It isn't. To quote some doctors who witnessed this debacle:

"Composition C-4 is the most common plastic explosive employed by the military in Vietnam. Ingestion is followed in a few hours by multiple generalized seizures, hematuria, severe nausea and vomiting, muscle twitching, and mentation changes. Six patients requiring hospitalization were treated by gastric lavage, maintenance of airway, control of seizures, monitoring of urine volume, and maintenance of fluid and electrolyte balance. No fatalities were observed."

ARL0886/iStock
Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the hospital toilets.

Honestly, if given the choice between being sober in Vietnam and getting dangerously high on plastic explosives in Vietnam, we'd probably snort the C-4 too.

Still, that doesn't really sound like a proper brew, which is where Viking shamans come in. The Middle Ages were a time when craft beers weren't on the menu, because hops were thought to "make the soul of man sad and weigh down his inner organs." In other words, regular beer made people sleepy and gassy. To avoid this, many brewers preferred to brew their beers with foraged herbs and spices. Because the job of brewing was typically left to the village shaman, they particularly liked using those with "magical" properties, medicinal and/or hallucinogenic. Beers were brewed with highly toxic substances like henbane, hemlock, meadowsweet, nightshade, and our good friend ergot. Henbane beer in particular became very popular, despite or maybe because of its tendency to transform men into the "perfect picture of mania." Per the brewers' insistence it had to be dug out of the ground by pretty virgin girls (which you'd think would be the creepiest brewing technique to date, but somehow it isn't).

Eventually, the magical beer spread outside of the Nordic lands, reaching down to countries like Germany and Scotland. The word "pilsner" even comes from the German word for henbane (pilsenkraut), showing how popular beer became after introducing the imported version. The practice of henbane brewing did become outlawed in the 16th century, which was still plenty of time to turn the countries it touched into beer fanatics. This isn't too surprising, considering they were basically chugging LSD.

kzenon/iStock
Don't know if you've noticed, but the Germans are somewhat fond of their beer.

Cannibalism as a means of absorbing the strength of your enemy is a trope usually reserved for Italian horror movies and the Civil War docudrama Ravenous. But up until the late Renaissance, folks from every continent and class believed that there was a strong medical connection between the soul and the body, and that by eating parts of the body one could also absorb part of that person's essence. Even Leonardo da Vinci was on board with this, claiming that the flesh of the dead regains its vigor and intelligence when served up with a nice Chianti and some fava beans.

Leonardo da Vinci
"Vitruvian Man is actually a serving-size suggestion."

A particular favorite since Roman times was drinking blood, with many wealthy citizens tapping the blood of slain gladiators to get their strength -- which seems dumb, right? Those gladiators lost. Maybe drink the blood of the ones who didn't get killed. Later, nine out of 10 doctors agreed that the fresher the blood, the more potent it would be. Drinking the blood of a virgin straight out of his or her arm, for example, could provide an incredible sensation of youth and vigor. Even poor people, who couldn't afford to buy fresh blood, would crowd the executioner's stand, cups readied to catch the overflow. If Game Of Thrones really were all about medieval realism, peasants would have been doing keg stands on Ned Stark's corpse before the executioner had time to mop up his sword.

HBO
"Calm down, calm down. You'll all get some. You're worse than kids crowding a pinata."

On a less vampiric level, people started thinking that maybe mixing other body parts with their food and drink was a good idea. The skull was particularly valued, because that's where smartness came from. King Charles II of England was a big fan of this, spiking his wine with sachets of powdered skull, believing it to be the ultimate pick-me-up for when he really needed to focus. These assumptions endured until terrifyingly recently, with academics like 17th-century "brain scientist" Thomas Willis (we're not sure what credentials he had to back up that title) claiming that mixing powdered skull with chocolate was a good way to alleviate brain hemorrhaging. We can only imagine what it was like to trick-or-treat at that guy's house.

Also check out The 20 Most Terrifying Ways Anyone Ever Got High and 5 Real Ways To Get High Straight Out Of Science Fiction.

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