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Post by rmarks1 on Sept 17, 2018 22:12:19 GMT -5
Some of these are incredible.
Bob
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Post by faskew on Sept 18, 2018 8:39:45 GMT -5
Fun stuff. Many of these are not crazy ideas, but are deformed folk and such, while others are actually good ideas for the time (iron lungs). A friend of mine in college spent several years in an iron lung and it warped his mind in bad ways. Sigh. (Yes, I am older than polio vaccine. My childhood was spent in terror of nuclear war and polio.)
I have a wonderful book on medicine in the 19th century and it covers all the bad ideas, hoaxes, etc. from those times. Some of the bad ideas, like homeopathy, are still going strong. But hey, if you put cocaine, caffeine, and sugar in a drink (Coca-Cola) it WILL make you feel better, right? What's not to like? LOL Freud got onto cocaine as a cure for nicotine addition. Bayer (of aspirin fame) invented heroin (sold over the counter) and promoted it as a cure for cocaine addiction and almost anything else they could think of.
For anyone interested in these things, I recommend the Cinemax series, "The Knick". Takes place at the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York in 1905 or so and deals with the medical practices of the time. Regardless of how bizarre, the weirdest things in the show are all true. For example, there really was a doctor in New York who believed that mental illness was caused by bad teeth, so he pulled all the teeth of his patients to cure them. !!!
I also have several books on circus freaks. Circuses were the only place such people could find jobs, and there was a sense of acceptance and family that the unfortunates couldn't get anywhere else. Some were kept as slaves, but good bosses, like P. T. Barnum, shared the wealth and several of his freaks became rich. The human reproductive process is seriously flawed (at least 50% of embryos die before the woman realizes that she is pregnant. Possibly as high as 75%). And the range of birth defects is beyond imagination. For anyone interested in circus freaks, I recommend the "American Horror Story" series on freaks (each year is a different subject). One of the actors was the smallest woman in the world at the time, about 16 inches, if I remember right. And, of course, the infamous horror film from the 1930s "Freaks", which used many real circus freaks in the cast. Note the trend - freaks = horror. I think that's because deformed humans are so shocking to us.
Anyway, Bob, an interesting series of pics.
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