Spiderwebs Stop Bleeding

Extraordinarily well documented historically. Ancient Greek soldiers used cobweb pads soaked in olive oil to staunch battlefield wounds, Shakespeare references the remedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a 1415 Gaelic medical manuscript describes it directly, and English soldiers reportedly carried small boxes of cobwebs into the Battle of Agincourt for exactly this purpose. It remained standard practice in both folk and professional medicine into the 18th century. The mechanical part holds up reasonably well: a web's dense, tangled fibres can genuinely help absorb blood and encourage clotting, simply by giving it a structure to cling to. The specific claim that spider silk has real antibacterial, infection-fighting properties, though, is not well supported, and recent research has pushed back directly on that part of the folklore.