Every year, modern medical science creates devices that advance the fight against human illness, frailty and mortality, increasing both our quality and quantity of life. These are not those devices. Rather, these 10 items represent a range of medical quackery, ill-conceived inventions and just plain insanity from the past 80 years of healthcare. If you ever see any of them in your doctor's office, seek help elsewhere.

Technology is great. It's given us TiVo, the George Foreman Grill and a wide array of manikins and faux body parts that medical students can practice on so that they don't practice on YOU. But wow, are they creepy. Here are some of the strangest and most nightmare-inducing examples.

History is full of catastrophes, and a plague is without doubt one of the deadliest. Modern medicine provides relief from some of them these days, but in past centuries humans have been at the mercy of all kinds of bacteria, viruses and other icky stuff.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Here is a list of famous human pandemics, and how the diseases responsible would be handled today.

Today, it's common knowledge that cigarettes are bad for your health, but as these vintage ads show, it used to be common for tobacco ads to resort to manipulation, half-truths, peer pressure and other tactics to brainwash people into believing that cigarettes were OK.

We know they're not expected to be pretty, amazing or especially creative. But shouldn't stock photos at least make sense? These medical stock photos, lifted from legitimate stock photo sites and (rather harshly) judged by our panel of experts, definitely missed that point.