Infant science was credited with 'cures' for 'what ails ya' but the magic was nothing more than morphine and cocaine.
Looking back it's easy to judge the stupidity of consuming a concoction containing opiates powerful to fog your senses. Are people smarter today?
No. People are just as naive, arrogant and stupid as they were a short 150 years ago. A hundred years from now people will look back and see Al Gore's Global Warming Cultists the same way we judge the morphine laced sugar water consumers of 1885.
The elixirs, potions, and snake oils sold to millions in the 'backward' infancy of the age of enlightenment are still all around us.
Want proof, consider the secular left-wing worship of personality. The Islamic crazies brain washed in 5th century Quran. And the green weenies ready to trash all of modern life in the name of faux science.
Billions are still living in squalor, disease and ignorance two-hundred years after mankind declared all such things obsolete. The more mankind advances, the more liberals regress.
