You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [64]
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 frightfully 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’ll save on buying Halls.
Heroin, by the way, was originally 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, hallucinations, 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 well 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-tall 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 mallet. Then I’ll 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 Dully, a grown man who’d had the procedure