Many times in medicine things start out as a treatment or a diagnostic test and later end up not panning out or worse ending up at something else.

Take for example what happened in the 1830s.

If I were to tell you using ketchup to medicate yourself,

well that just sounds ridiculous doesn't it? This wasn't the case in the 1830s

when tomato ketchup took the American health care industry by storm.

Before that, ketchup was made, believe it or not,

from mushrooms or fish,

and some even considered tomatoes to be poisonous.

I cannot even imagine what lasagna was like then.

Until around 1834, when Dr. John Cook Benet

started to add tomatoes to ketchup and transform this condiment into what became the hottest drug of the 1800s.

That's right.

Ketchup became a super popular craze and what he claimed was that he had done research on the tomato

and that it was going to be capable of curing several ailments like diarrhea,

cholera, jaundice, indigestion, and even rheumatism.

Benet even encouraged people to go ahead and take your tomatoes and cook them down

and benefit from this fruits healing powers.

His research was so widely publicized that he was even

picked up by local newspapers and not just T.M. Z. but like the real ones.

It was actually so popular in the newspapers that an entrepreneur and businessman named Alexander Miles tried to patent a medicine

called the American hygiene pill, which was basically connected to an extract of tomato.

This basically maximized the tomato craze and his research boosted the extract

...