Fancy bathing in this whale's rotting innards? Shutterstock

The Australian National Maritime Museum has revealed that sufferers of rheumatism were once advised to sit inside the festering carcasses of whales in order to relieve their symptoms.

The museum has recently opened a new exhibit in Sydney, which seeks to uncover the diversity, origins and adaptation of whales, charting their development from land mammals to aquatic giants. The exhibition, entitled "Amazing Whales" also looks at the different relationships humans have had with the cetaceans, which includes their apparent medicinal qualities.


Those afflicted with rheumatism were advised to sit inside the belly of a dead whale for approximately 30 hours. If the patient could stay the course and withstand this bizarre practice, they were promised at least 12 months of relief from pain.

[pullquote source="Whale "bathing" patient, 1896"]The whale had been dead about forty hours, and had started to decompose, and the whole time we were sitting and standing there great blasts of gas and horrible bubbles would gush out around us and make our hair stand on end.[/pullquote]

The propensity for climbing inside the rotten stomachs of whales is believed to have started in the whaling town of Eden, on the southeast coast of Australia -- although it had apparently been occurring in America for years before this. It was believed that the warmth and fumes generated by the rotting carcass had healing properties.

George Lewis Beck, an Australian Pacific trader, short-story writer and novelist documented the details of this procedure in his book, A Memory of the Southern Seas: "When a whale is killed and towed ashore (it does not matter whether it is a 'right,' humpback, finback, or sperm whale) and while the interior of the carcass still retains a little warmth, a hole is put through one side of the body sufficiently large to admit the patient, the lower part of whose body from the feet to the waist should sink in the whale's intestines, leaving the head, of course, outside the aperture. "The latter is closed up as closely as possible, otherwise the patient would not be able to breathe through the volume of ammoniacal gases which would escape from every opening left uncovered. It is these gases, which are of an overpowering and atrocious odour, that bring about the cure, so the whalemen say.


Sometimes the patient cannot stand this horrible bath for more than an hour, and has to be lifted out in a fainting condition, to undergo a second, third, or perhaps fourth course on that or the following day."

The apparent beginnings of the "whale cure" are suggested in the

Pall Mall Gazette on 7 March 1896, which describes how a stumbling drunk fell into a whale carcass, only to emerge hours later completely sober and cured of his rheumatism: "The whale had already been cut open, and appeared to our hilarious friend [the drunk] a tempting morsel of flesh. He made for it and plunged right into the huge mountain of decomposed blubber. His friends, horrified, rushed to the rescue and made valiant attempts to rescue him, but in vain. The heat and the smell were too great, and they retired to wait until he should come to his senses and fight his way out. He found himself so comfortable that he did not emerge for over two hours."

Further documented instances of the whale cure can be found in the Sydney Bulletin on 8 September 1896: "The smell and heat were hardly bearable. The whale had been dead about forty hours, and had started to decompose, and the whole time we were sitting and standing there great blasts of gas and horrible bubbles would gush out around us and make our hair stand on end." While the man who bathed inside the dead whale claimed to have been cured of his pain, there was a significant drawback -- the lingering stench meant girls did not wish to be near him, which he found concerning.


The curator of the exhibit, Michelle Linder, told the Sunday Morning Herald, "I don't know there was scientific evidence per se [to support the practice] but there was hearsay at the time that they felt better after being in the whale. "It was done elsewhere but I don't think it was a really popular thing to do. It would have been an isolated thing to do."

These days, we do not need to sleep inside dead whales. Instead, there are many different medicines including painkillers (paracetamol, codeine), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, corticosteroids, disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs and biological treatments that are far more effective and scientifically proven to relieve symptoms or slow the progression of rheumatism.

The exhibition runs until 20 July, 2014.