r/history • u/spark8000 • 20d ago
What are some crazy or hilarious harmful things/practices that used to be common place in history? Discussion/Question
I've been looking into collecting a list of unintentionally harmful things or practices that used to be common in history. It's a topic that is rather fascinating, and depending on the context, rather comedic to read about. Here are some examples I have:
- One relatively well known example included blood letting to balance the four humors in medical practices.
- Using mercury as a medical treatment or, in the case of Qin Shi Huang, the key to immortality.
- Using radium dials and gauges to allow pilots in WWII to fly at night due to their radioactive glow. Many of the workers who painted these dials and gauges would develop cancer.
- Bayer Laboratories developed heroin cough syrup in 1898.
- In the 1930's there was an energy drink on the market called, "RadiThor" which contained one microcurie of radium dissolved in water.
I've been finding it hard to find unique or interesting examples on the internet, I thought maybe this could be the place to find some?
8
u/Vast-Combination4046 19d ago
Putting bleach and borax in spoiled milk and giving it to your baby has to be the most insane practice I've ever heard of.
1
u/spark8000 19d ago
Woah what?! I’ve never heard of this before, when did this happen?
5
u/slacker25 19d ago
5
u/spark8000 19d ago
This is fascinating, I particularly like how they deflate the whole romanticized idea of food “in the good ol’ days” being more wholesome and healthy.
1
u/throwawaydragon99999 18d ago
to be fair, most people lived in rural environments and would grow or raise their own food or knew the people who did
1
2
u/Vast-Combination4046 19d ago
Before refrigerators were available people had to do something about making food last longer. I don't remember the specifics but it was late victorian era/ industrial revolution sorta stuff.
3
u/third-try 18d ago
Preserving meat with formaldehyde. Caused a ruckus when the US Army volunteers were fed it as rations in the Spanish-American war. The standard use of nitrates and nitrites was just as bad for you and caused a lot of stomach cancer which we don't have now.
Putting cooked meat in tin cans which were then sealed with lead solder. It's debated whether the Franklin Arctic Expedition was wiped out by lead poisoning, scurvy, or spoiled meat.
2
u/spark8000 19d ago
Oh yeah I think I may have found some literature on it, thank you!
4
u/Vast-Combination4046 19d ago
There is a podcast called "stuff you missed in history class" that cover stuff like this. Im pretty sure that's where I found out about it. They have been going for ages and its always very in depth and still wrapped up in about 45 min or so.
1
1
u/jezreelite 18d ago
This is mentioned in the documentary "Dangers of the Victorian Home."
There are also similar documentaries about Tudor, Edwardian, and Post-War homes that have highlights like chimneys collapsing in fires, radium infused personal care products, uneven staircases, bare electric wires in the home, and uranium in a children's chemistry set.
6
u/sitquiet-donothing 19d ago
Heroin, morphine, and cocaine. All three were at one time available in just everything. Freud recommended dosing coke throughout the day. Heroin was made to get people off of Morphine, which was available in bottles at your drug store. All of these were endorsed and there is growing evidence that a lot of people died of drug overdoses or chronic poisonings because of the use of these things, nobody made the connection for some time though. Hell, you can still get codeine in many places outside the USA OTC.
3
u/FitzNCHI 19d ago
AKA "Patent Medicine"
1
u/sitquiet-donothing 19d ago
Yup. We still haven't learned our lessons.
5
u/FitzNCHI 19d ago
Hmm? This is the cause of the formation of the Food and Drug Administration in the US after some other legislation before it. I would say we did learn our lesson. This was a separate issue from corrupt prescribers, greedy manufacturers, and lack of awareness of dependence that you may be referring to.
3
u/sitquiet-donothing 19d ago
I don't mean to be explicit about current affairs, but the USA is currently in the grips of the worst toxic poisoning epidemic in history, and it was all approved by the FDA when they thought that you couldn't get addicted to opiates if you were using them for pain management and having no controls over pain management practices.
1
u/third-try 18d ago
Actually, Bayer invented Heroin as a cough medicine. It's a very good cough medicine. They sold it in tablets, like their other big invention, Aspirin. "A" tablets were Aspirin, "H" for Heroin. A 1910 pocket guide to medicine says the expectation that it would not be addictive, unlike Morphine, had been found to be false, unfortunately.
Morphine addiction was a real problem. A lot of companies offered "cures" which, when analyzed, all contained morphine.
1
u/sitquiet-donothing 17d ago
Yes, but the medical folks started endorsing it for a cure to morphine withdrawals, because they didn't think you could get hooked if used as medicine. They blamed the morphine epidemic on people getting "high" instead of using it as prescribed, many of them war vets.
3
u/DonManuel 19d ago
Radioactive tooth paste, also Tho-Radia made a whole product line of perfumes, creams, facial powders, lipsticks and other beauty products that contained thorium-cloride and radium. Then Thalidomid, Asbestos, DDT ...
3
2
u/limestone2u 19d ago
Phossy jaw. - normally happened to women. Women who worked in match making (as in fire). The phosphorous would over time dissolve bone normally the jaw. Still had skin there just no bone to support it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw
Radium girls - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
2
u/OldguyinMaine 19d ago
X-ray machines to fit children's shoes. The child basically put their foot right on top of the x-ray tube in a wooden case and then blasted the kid, Mom and the salesman with x-rays. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/radiating-shoe-sales/
2
u/Flaky_Operation687 19d ago
I don't know how far back it goes, but intentionally getting tapeworms for weight loss and management was a thing for a bit.
3
u/41942319 19d ago
Using lead pipes for drinking water. Also lead-based anything really. Make-up, paint, etc.
4
2
u/[deleted] 18d ago
Lead pipes aren't as bad as you'd think. Running water through a lead pipe and storing it in another container will generally have such tiny amounts of lead as to not be a concern.
A bigger concern is lead vessels, where over time water will leech more lead out of the walls. Particularly if the water had any additives that aide in the corrosion of lead.
1
u/third-try 18d ago
It's not metallic lead that gets into water, it's lead hydroxide. Acidic liquids, such as beer, will pick up lethal amounts rapidly.
1
u/[deleted] 18d ago
Yeah it would never be straight lead, just ionized lead atoms in solution. That's why it matters alot whether the water sits in lead for a long time, the longer you have all those ions bouncing around against elemental lead the more lead atoms will have an electron stolen and get pulled into solution.
Or.. at least I believe that's how it works. You might know more
1
u/Baneken 16d ago
And Romans used lead acetate to sweeten their wine.
1
u/[deleted] 13d ago
There's a bit of truth to that but it's not the whole story. They didn't voluntarily add lead acetate to make wine sweeter. They reduced wine to make defrutum, whence sometimes lead vessels were used. Some defrutum guides recommended lead vessels, but this wasn't because they were consciously trying to create lead acetate but because bronze would leach gross tasting metal, if bronze was to be used they recommended smearing the inside with oil to prevent the taste.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html
^ thus is a very good write up on lead poisoning in Ancient Rome
2
u/voidxleech 19d ago
corpse medicine. do i need to say more than that? hah
2
u/spark8000 19d ago
Haha Ok this sounds interesting, you talking about how people used to eat corpses like mummies for medical purposes?
3
u/voidxleech 19d ago
oh it goes much deeper than that. hah one story that sticks out to me is that when someone would be publicly beheaded, there would be groups of poor folk with bowls and buckets below the stage that would attempt to catch any blood that flowed down bc fresh blood was so expensive. it’s definitely an interesting rabbit hole.
5
u/spark8000 19d ago
Ok see it’s stuff like this why I choose to ask Reddit these questions, I never would have found out about that. Wow. I would love to do a headfirst dive into this rabbit hole.
2
u/RaevynSkyye 19d ago
People used to believe in blood letting.
Basically, they give you a cut and let you bleed into a bowl. It was somehow supposed to cure things.
1
u/[deleted] 18d ago
Using mercury (such as calomel) or lead salts to treat illnesses isn't as crazy as you'd think. Such forms of heavy metals are incredibly toxic, and are very harmful to people, yes.
However they are also harmful to bacteria. And in a world before antibiotics and germ theory, infections are both common and extremely deadly.
If you look at it in aggregate, poisoning your infection and potentially saving your life is 100% worth the downsides of lead or mercury poisoning. In fact medicine isn't so different today, this is the same medical idea as chemotherapy for cancer treatment.
2
u/spark8000 18d ago
Not sure this is quite the same comparison. Chemotherapy damages you, yes, but while people can recover from chemotherapy, the human body has no ability to purge lead. It cannot be metabolized or excreted, serving no purpose in the human body. There is no way to reverse damage done by lead poisoning, making it an awful medicine.
1
u/[deleted] 18d ago
Yes, heavy metal poisoning causes irreversible damage. But you're talking about decades of life, with reduced quality, to simply dying outright. I think people have a really distorted perspective here because we don't fully conceptualize how dangerous infections are without antibiotics.
Also, it's wrong to think chemotherapy can't have permanent side effects. It can and does for many people.
1
u/reverendjeff 19d ago
Arsenic, lead, heroin... These are as recent as the 20th century. 🤦🏻♂️
2
u/spark8000 19d ago
Well yes, I knew all these. Even mentioned some in my post. I’m looking for other stuff than the common, obvious ones. Preferably earlier than the 20th century.
1
u/IndianLibrarian 19d ago edited 19d ago
In 1950s America, women workers at the radium clock factories would sometimes buy some radium powder and apply it on their clothes or even worse, skin. They thought that the glow made them look fairer and more beautiful. I think you can probably guess what happened to many of these women later on.
1
1
u/Bedotnobot 19d ago
Ladies in the Renaissance used to sun bleach their hair and use rinses with bird droppings as the main ingredient not as dangerous as lead, or radioactive substances, for sure but still strange.
After the end of the Great Plague as paper was considered to get easily contaminated and preserve diseases letters were treated with fire or vinegar. The latter less difficult to manage without many complications. The Disinfecting fire treatment of letter - if I understood correctly- several times along it's way , from sender to recipient, could result in the loss of important documents.
Keeping the body away from water. <sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, believing plague and syphilis originated by smells, is extremely widespread fear of water based on the theory ‘scientific’ of the porous body: it is argued that the disease passes through the pores and, therefore, it is necessary to preserve the body waterproof and bathing suit with a thousand precautions and only in very rare cases, even on medical> And you're absolutely right it's a fascinating topic.
1
u/Beautiful_Ad8543 18d ago
there was that chinese emperor that took mercury to try extending his life. instead he just ended up with long term mercury poisoning
1
u/scootmcdoo 15d ago
I think Louis and Clark's exhibition were given Indian wives who actually gave some members STDs which were treated by using Mercury on their junk....
0
u/ArkyBeagle 18d ago
This is kind of the "reverse" to the question, but....
The single biggest thing in terms of avoiding disease has to be the invention of the sanitary sewer. It is only quite recently - like the 1920s - that keeping the poop out of the drinking water was understood widely as a good idea.
11
u/Aspland_Photography 19d ago
Arsenic in green wallpaper or lead in makeup are good stories