In ancient Greece, physicians
routinely mixed cockroach entrails with oil of roses, stuffing this unsavory
goop into their patients' infected ear canals. It should be noted, however,
that Greek healers and natural historians were founts of misinformation.
Pliny, for instance, proclaimed that a person carrying a woo dpecker's beak
would be immune to bee stings. For spider bites, his patients were advised
to quaff a brew containing five live ants.
In the apothecaries of ancient China, dried roaches were prescribed to treat visceral diseases and maintain the digestion. Today they are still sold (for around two dollars an ounce) in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown neighborhood. Chinese Materia Medica, a 1984 publication of the Orient Cultural Service in Taipei, lists several different kinds of blattarians that are believed to be beneficial in a wide range of situations-- to treat feverish chills, swollen tongues, children "crying in the night with stomach ache," and for "breaking up retained blood clots, thereby promoting fertility."
Dried and powdered cockroaches were the main ingredient of pulvis tarakanae, a remedy for pleurisy and pericarditis that was embraced by doctors throughout Europe and the U.S. This treatment may have originated in Czarist Russia, where a similar compound was manufactured for the treatment of dropsy. A few more medicinal uses of roaches (in this particular instance Blatta orientalis, the Oriental cockroach) were identified in the 1907 edition of Merck's Index:
"Constituents; Blattaric acid; antihydropin; fetid, fatty oil. Uses: internal, in dropsy, Bight's disease, whooping cough, etc. External; as an oil decoction for warts, ulcers, boils, etc. Doses: 10-15 grains in dropsy, as powder or pills, or four fluid drams decoction."
In an 1886 issue of the New York Tribune, the curious medical practices in Louisiana were described. These included the prescribing of cockroach tea for tetanus, supplemented by a poultice of boiled roaches over the wound. Because of the "amazing" size of the Oriental cockroach in Louisiana, few would be required for a large plaster. The Blattaria were also fried in oil with garlic -- a time-honored treatment for indigestion. Years later, the legendary New Orleans jazz singer Louis Armstrong recalled being served a broth made from several boiled roaches, whenever he was ill. Whether this treatment soothed or caused Armstrong's gravelly voice has yet to be resolved.
For "dilation of the stomach," the 1930 translation of The Medical Book of Malayan Medicine recommends that roaches, "either 7 or 3 in number," be burnt and their ashes mixed with water. "Let the sick man drink this for three days in succession," it advises. "Do not inform him what his medicine contains, and let him be relieved."
From The Compleat Cockroach, Ten Speed Press.
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