You Might Be a Zombie . . . (25 page)

9. CALM YOUR COUGH WITH HEROIN

Hard drugs weren’t just for infants. In the late nineteenth century, people apparently took cough  suppression seriously.

We’re talking, “I’m going to take me

some heroin to calm this cough” level serious, here. We know Victorians were sticklers for social etiquette and wheezing your head off was probably considered frightful y rude, but we can’t imagine tying off and shooting some horse in the middle of a dinner party would go over terribly well, either.

You probably don’t need us to tell you how addictive and destructive heroin is, but just in case: Heroin? Might want to avoid that stuff. On the upside, it actually does suppress coughs, so if you do become a junkie at least you’l save on buying Hal s.

Heroin, by the way, was original y developed by Bayer. You know, those friendly folks behind harmless old aspirin. How is that not at the center of every single Tylenol ad campaign? Tylenol: The fast-acting pain reliever that didn’t invent heroin.

8. THE CURATIVE POWERS OF MERCURY

For centuries, mercury was used to treat pretty much everything. Scraped your knee? Just rub a little mercury on it. Having some problems with regularity?

Forget fiber, get some mercury up in there! If you lived more than a hundred years ago, you simply weren’t considered healthy if you weren’t leaking silver from at least one orifice.

Mercury, as we know, is toxic as hell. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include chest pains, heart and lung problems, coughing, tremors, violent muscle spasms, psychotic reactions, delirium, hal ucinations, suicidal tendencies, restless spleen syndrome, penis knotting, and anal implosion. OK, we just made the last few up, but they barely looked out of place in that horror show of symptoms, right?

7. ELECTRICAL IMPOTENCE CURES

Men have been desperately trying to fix their malfunctioning members since wel before the late nineteenth century, but that’s when impotent men discovered the wonders of electricity.

Electrified beds, elaborate cock-shocking electric belts, and other devices were advertised as being able to return “male power” and prowess by making your penis rise to electrified attention like a six-inch-tal Frankenstein’s monster.

What’s fascinating is that you can find ads for more than one brand of electric dick-shock belt, which seems to indicate that the dick-shock belt industry somehow survived the negative word of mouth from the first dick-shock belt. It would also suggest that the following conversation took place on a regular basis, “What’s it do, Doc? Actually, don’t answer that, I’m puttin’ it on my junk.”

6. LOBOTOMIES

You’re sitting on your psychiatrist’s couch, pouring your tortured heart out about how depressed you are. “I think I have the solution to your depression,” he says, producing a ten-inch-long ice pick. “I’m going to jam this into your eye socket, then put it into your brain using this mal et. Then I’l wiggle it around so that it shreds part of your brain. Then you won’t be depressed anymore. I’m a doctor.”

Congratulations hypothetical 1940s version of yourself, you’ve just been lobotomized! Lobotomies were a popular fad for the first half of the twentieth century and were floated as a “cure” for pretty much any mental issue you can name, from anxiety to schizophrenia.

The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel Prize for it in 1949. Doctors claimed the ice-pick-to-the-freaking-eye method of lobotomy would be as quick and easy as a trip to the dentist. By 1960, parents were getting them for their moody teenage children.

“As you can see, gentlemen, we now know everything there is to know about the human body. I am, like, 95% sure.”

In 2005, NPR profiled Howard Dul y, a grown man who’d had the procedure performed in 1960, when he was just twelve. Medical records indicate that his stepmother’s psychiatrist recommended a lobotomy after she’d complained that he was “defiant,” “didn’t respond wel to punishment,” and “objects to going to bed,” or as it’s known to modern doctors, being a normal freaking twelve-year-old boy.

Some seventy thousand people were lobotomized before somebody figured out that driving a spike into the brain probably was not the answer to all of life’s problems.

5. TREPANATION

Like the lobotomy’s old, senile grandfather, trepanation is basical y a fancy word for dril ing holes in your head. It’s also the oldest surgical procedure known to man. Trepanation holes were found in 40 of 120 human skul s discovered at a prehistoric burial site in France estimated to be eight thousand years old.

Most commonly used as a treatment for seizures and migraines in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was also used as an extreme form of cosmetic/experimental body modification amongst several pre-Columbian American societies. Nobody’s quite sure why the French cavemen did it.

Probably because they’d just invented tools and nobody’d invented any furniture for them to put together yet.

4. URINE THERAPY

You can tell by the title of this entry that we’re not heading anywhere good. Throughout history there have been those who believed the key to good health was wall owing in one’s own excretions. Urine was said to cure an endless list of ailments and to promote good health if consumed, was applied to the skin and, yes, some even used it to give themselves (turn away now weak of heart) a nice bracing urine enema.

Perhaps the best part of this is that, unlike the other practices listed here, urine therapy lives on today. Of all the crack-pot theories listed here, the one that endured is the one where people drink and bathe in piss.

There’s absolutely no evidence that urine therapy can cure a damn thing, though there is conclusive evidence proving that it can absolutely make you smel like old people.

3. BLOODLETTING

Bloodletting was one of the most enduring and popular medical practices in history, originated by the Greeks and used up until the nineteenth century for, well, basical y everything. If you were feeling under the weather back in the day, there’s a good chance it was because you just had too much blood.

A person having too much blood may sound absurd, but that’s just because you don’t know about the four humors. The theory was that the body was filled with blood, phlegm, yel ow bile, and black bile and that an imbalance of the four fluids was the root of all il ness. Apparently, blood could be a bit of a space hog, and thus patients were bled to make room for more fun stuff like black bile (diarrhea).

If you’re wondering what made people think this worked for so long, the next time you’re at death’s door with the flu go out and give up to four quarts of blood. We can assure you your flu won’t be cured, but you’l probably
feel
a lot better as you take a delirious blood-loss-inspired trip through the clouds!

2. HARD-CORE DIET REMEDIES

While ful er figures have been popular for most of history, during the twentieth—or “no fat chicks”—century, thin was in for women. This need to be slim led to the creation of countless so-cal ed diet pil s.

While a lot of the pills actually did help with weight loss, they also caused fevers, heart troubles, blindness, death, and birth defects. In the 1950s and 1960s, women liked diet pil s so darn much that they just couldn’t seem to stop taking them. This was because the diet pills of the ’50s and ’60s were in actuality bottles of pure crank. But hey, what’s being a nervous, amphetamine-addicted wreck when being ready for bathing suit season hangs in the balance?

1. FEMALE HYSTERIA CURES

Women and their mood swings—right, guys? Now, if you happen to be female don’t be offended, there’s no shame in admitting to the occasional bit of moodiness (or irritability or anxiousness or a ton of other things) as according to nineteenth-century doctors it’s a symptom of a deadly serious medical condition.

So how do you cure a “condition” that coincidental y was diagnosed almost entirely in women who dared disobey their Victorian husbands? The prescription for female hysteria was usually a good spot of doctor-administered vaginal massage until the woman achieved “hysterical paroxysm.”

Yes. The cure for female hysteria was a doctor’s hand down your bloomers until you were screaming his name. Is it any wonder the list of symptoms for female hysteria was so long? Doctors, astonishingly enough, grew tired of “curing” all these women. According to Rachel P. Maines’s
The Technology of
Orgasm
, the hand strain led doctors to invent the vibrator, and thus this section comes to a happy ending.

WHILE
modern women still deal with entirely too much job discrimination, domestic abuse, and sex with Gene Simmons, that’s nothing compared to the old days. Back when
feminist
was a homophobic adjective and
suffrage
was what women got when dinner was cold, some ingenious voices were never heard because they just happened to be attached to a pair of breasts.

4. ROSALIND FRANKLIN

Rosalind Franklin was a pioneer in the field of genetics, whose work on unraveling the DNA double helix was largely ignored. Franklin studied at Cambridge in the 1940s, a school that didn’t give women degrees at the time, figuring they wouldn’t know what to do with something like an advanced biology degree—probably sew it a little suit and take it for summer constitutionals.

Stil , Franklin went on to research molecular biology around the same time as Francis Crick and James Watson, the scientists credited with discovering DNA’s double helix model. In fact, she wasn’t far from making the discovery herself and was wel ahead of Crick and Watson when her boss, Maurice Wilkins, intervened. Doing his duty as a concerned citizen, Wilkins knew he couldn’t trust such valuable scientific knowledge in the hands of a mere woman—surely it was only a matter of time before she accidental y baked it into a pie!

Working behind Franklin’s back, Wilkins gave her findings to Watson, who used them and Crick’s LSD-spiked intuition (see page 123) to leapfrog Franklin and discover DNA’s double helix pattern before her.

Their double helix model was published in an issue of
Nature
magazine, instantly making them international celebrities. Rather than acknowledging the role a woman played in the actual discovery,
Nature
published Franklin’s not yet complete work in the same journal. Sure, publishing the almost-discovery of DNA’s model in the same issue as the actual discovery might seem redundant, but
Nature
couldn’t miss out on the adorable hilarity of a woman trying to do science. That was probably considered the monkey riding a bicycle of its day.

Buried by the boobs

In 1962, Crick, Watson, and Maurice goddamned Wilkins (whose contribution to molecular biology amounted to hating women) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, while Franklin received the Dick-Al Prize for Diddly-Squat. Franklin’s huge contribution was almost totally ignored in Watson’s paper. We never thought we’d say this, but
damn you, boobs!

3. CAMILLE CLAUDEL

Camille Claudel was a young, shockingly talented sculptress whose works are today considered masterpieces. Her career path followed the classic artist model: fabulous early works, discovery by a great mentor, total insanity, dying unloved, alone, and weird. (This is why your parents didn’t let you go to art school.) But while some artists go crazy because it’s the cool thing to do (we’re looking at you Van Gogh), Claudel was force-fed crazy pills for her socially unacceptable lack of a penis.

In 1800s Paris, women were prohibited from studying the nude human form, because this would’ve ruined the wedding-night surprise. (Surprise! It’s a penis.) Claudel was therefore unable to gain entry to the École des Beaux-Arts, where she would have been able to promote her work and receive commissions. In short, Claudel needed some cock in the worst way.