Hay fever and ‘The Devil’s Dandruff’: When the ‘cure’ is worse than the condition

It’s with unbridled and foolish optimism that we look forward to the official beginning of spring next month. Along with warmer weather (theoretically) and longer days, we will of course get the usual influence of seasonal allergens to add to the all-year-round nuisances of pet dander or mites.

Countless millions of research dollars have been poured into studying new and improved therapies for hypersensitivity to these allergens. But in common with many other conditions, in the early years, doctors and chemists fumbled with ‘cures’ that ranged from the amusing to the alarming.

Allergic rhinitis was not even recognised by the medical profession as a real condition until the early 19th Century. It was important to distinguish hay fever from a cold, as in those days, catching a cold could lead to a grim prognosis.

For hay fever, the symptoms were often ‘treated’ in isolation. A book from the mid-17th Century by Arthur Corbett purported to have the remedy: Gather a number of snails that reside “in walls and hollow trees” – apparently that detail is important – and heat them over a fire until their bodily fluids leak out from the vial. Capers and sugar were added to the liquid, which was then ready to drop into someone’s unsuspecting eyes.

Moving on to the late 1800s and a ‘remedy’ that was a lot more radical – removal of part of the nose. Described as ‘galvano-cauterisation’, this procedure was inflicted on a number of patients before being abandoned as too severe and lacking an evidence-base.

Fast-forward our anthology of bizarre hay fever treatments to the 1980s and the invention of the ‘Bubble Helmet’. This ridiculous contraption is what you might imagine – a clear plastic dome engulfed the entire head and it was connected to an electrically-powered unit that was worn around the waist. This unit fed filtered, pollen-free air to the bubble helmet at low pressure. It was invented by an architect who suffered with allergies and a few hundred units were sold before the idea fizzled-out. We may scoff, but if Covid-19 had broken out in the 1980s, there’s a chance we could all have been walking around looking like astronauts for a year, and making that architect a very rich man in the process.

Back to the early 1900s – when Dr Samuel Feinberg prescribed alcoholic drinks to ease the symptoms of hay fever. This never caught on en masse, although the alcohol no doubt provided temporary symptom relief for obvious reasons.

Another offbeat idea was using egg whites to ease eye inflammation caused by allergies. An egg white was simply mixed in a cup with alum, a substance used primarily for pickling. As you might imagine, this compound created more irritation than it prevented.

Before the dangers of cocaine were fully known, it was prescribed for everything from altitude sickness to psychiatric illness, and hay fever didn’t escape. In the late 1800s, otolaryngologist Dr E Fletcher Ingles was one of its strongest proponents, describing its use for allergic rhinitis as “highly recommended”, presumably with no pun intended.

Predictably, his patients asked for increasing doses of the drug and by the following summer, none experienced the effects of seasonal allergy. This was regarded as further proof of the benefits of cocaine, rather than the fact that most of the patients’ nerves in their nasal passages had by then been obliterated.

In fairness to Dr Ingles, many other physicians also touted cocaine for hay fever. The last word on the matter goes to Dr George Frederick Laidlaw, a noteworthy physician, who wrote in an 1887 article: “If you can’t cure it without cocaine, you’d better keep the hay fever.”