Victorians thought trains made people crazy. Atlas Obscura
7. The Dumb Belief That Trains Made People Crazy
An armed train passenger on a train to Liverpool went crazy and began to attack windows in order to get at passengers in other compartments. When the train slowed down and stopped at its next station, the lunatic calmed down. When the train got underway again, he went nuts once more, only to calm down once more when the train stopped at the next station. The pattern of going wild while the train was in motion, then calming down when it slowed down and stopped, was repeated until the train reached Liverpool.
May 11th, 1889, Police News illustration of a struggle with a lunatic in a train car. Atlas Obscura
Newspapers and mental health professionals of the day linked his bouts of madness to train travel. However, instead of reasoning that he was a mentally disturbed individual, for whom train travel was a trigger, they concluded that train travel was the cause of his mental illness. The belief persisted, well into the twentieth century, that something about the speed or motion of trains drove people mad. That pattern of flawed analysis, which confused correlation with causation, kept repeating itself. Somebody would act crazy or in a socially unacceptable way in a moving train, and the train’s speed or motion would be blamed as the cause of the craziness.
Today, pineapples are often just a Dole can and can opener away and can be had for a dollar or less. As such, it might be hard to grasp just how exotic and rare they once used to be. When Christopher Columbus returned from his second voyage in 1496, he brought back a consignment of pineapples. Only one of them survived the sea passage without rotting, but that one was enough to send the Spanish court into raptures. One courtier wrote that “its flavor excels all other fruits”. It was understandable, considering that sweet things were not as common in Europe back then as they are today.
Refined sugar back in those days was rare and extremely expensive, while fruits were only available in season. As such, a ripe sweet pineapple could have been the tastiest thing that a European of that era had ever tasted. An even greater factor was the exotic appearance: pineapples looked like nothing Europeans had seen before. On top of that, in an era when sugar was believed to possess medicinal qualities, it was not a far leap for sweet pineapples to come to be seen as miracle fruits with healing properties similar to those of sugar.
A 1558 depiction of a pineapple. University of Virginia Library
5. The King of Fruit
An envoy of Spain’s King Ferdinand had this to say about the exotic pineapple: “[it is] the most beautiful of fruits I have seen. I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other of so exquisite and lovely appearance“. Pineapples became prized status symbols, and were esteemed to an extent that might seem ridiculous and dumb today, but was anything but at the time. In an era when royalists advocated the divine right of kings, anything with a crown came to be associated with heavenly approval.
The pineapple fruit, whose spiny top resembled a crown, became a symbolic manifestation of monarchy. As a result, it soon became known as “The King of Fruit”. Between that, the vast distances that pineapples had to travel in order to reach Europe, their sheer exoticism, and the fact that most people had never set eye on one before, the possession of a pineapple became a status symbol. So much so that, as seen below, pineapples were used in international politics and diplomacy.
Britannia presented with cornucopia, including pineapples. Wellcome Images
4. Pineapples Became Instruments of Diplomacy
In 1668, an ambassador from the court of King Louis XIV of France arrived in England to mediate a dispute between the two kingdoms over some Caribbean islands. England’s King Charles II ordered a pineapple from the English colony of Barbados perched atop a fruit pyramid at a dinner feast in honor of the French envoy. Contemporaries saw it as a public relations triumph, which asserted English dominance in the region. The move was seen by contemporaries as a visual illustration of England’s naval supremacy.
The presence of a pineapple signified that the English could get the rare fruits from the Caribbean at will, while the French could not. From then on, the pineapple, which Charles II christened “King-Pine“, became his favorite status symbol. He even commissioned a painting of the royal gardener presenting him with one. By the eighteenth century, pineapples could be grown in European greenhouses- but only at great expense, in the ballpark of $15,000. To eat them was considered wasteful, however. So they were used as fancy dinner ornaments and passed from party to party until they rotted.
Transcripts from an 1807 Old Bailey case about pineapple theft. BBC
3. Pineapple Rentals Used to be a Thing
In one of the more ridiculous developments that seem dumb today, people who weren’t rich enough to own pineapples – but wanted to look like they were – rented them from shops that sprang up to cater to their social-climbing needs. Pineapples were expensive enough to warrant the presence of security guards and for good reason. For example, 1807 Old Bailey transcripts show several pineapple theft cases, including one against a Mr. Gooding who got transported to Australia for seven years because he stole seven pineapples.
As the nineteenth progressed, steamships’ increased reliability and ever greater cargo space enabled the importation of pineapples in bulk. Their resultant availability at ever lower costs lowered their prestige. That did not sit well with the upper classes, for whom the tropical fruit had once been a marker of status. Indeed, the notion that pineapples were available – and affordable – to everybody annoyed the snobby set. Cartoons of working-class people eating pineapples were used in satirical prints, visual metaphors of the downside of progress in what seemed to the elites as a world turned upside down.
Jean-Leon Gerome’s ‘With a Turned Thumb’, 1872. Wikimedia
2. The Medicinal Properties of Gladiator Bodily Fluids
Ancient Romans had mixed feelings about gladiators. On the one hand, they were despised as slaves, trained under brutal conditions, marginalized, and generally segregated from society. On the other hand, gladiators, were admired and celebrated as if they were a cross between modern rock stars and star athletes. Because of their constant training, gladiators were often impressive physical specimens, well proportioned, with rippling muscles glistening in the arena before spectators. Understandably, that made them the objects of sexual fantasies for many Romans, both women and men. If the gladiator sexual fantasy could not be gratified directly – and huge, although not insurmountable, social barriers stood in the way, especially for women – it might still be gratified at a remove.
Ancient Roman mosaic depicting gladiators. Encyclopedia Britannica
Dumb as it sounds, gladiator bodily fluids, such as their sweat, were highly sought-after commodities. Rich Roman women, in particular, paid a lot for sweat and dirt from the bodies of famous gladiators. A curved metal blade called a strigil, used by Romans to remove dirt, perspiration, and oils from the skin before bathing was used to scrape sweat and dirt from gladiators’ skins. It was then collected in vials, that were offered for sale outside the gladiatorial games. The buyers would often apply the gladiators’ sweat and grime directly to their faces, as a type of facial cream. Others might mix it with cosmetics and perfumes – which in Ancient Rome were usually the preserve of women of status.
1. Ancient Romans Used Gladiator Blood as an Aphrodisiac and to Treat Epilepsy
Gladiator blood was also sought after by Roman women. Many applied the blood of their favorite arena combatant to coat their jewelry, combs, wigs, and other accouterments or mixed it with their cosmetics. Gladiators were seen as particularly virile, which led to the somewhat ghoulish and macabre practice of using their blood (and sometimes sweat) as an aphrodisiac. The more successful and famous a gladiator, the more potent an aphrodisiac his blood or sweet were believed to be. It could be drunk pure, but more often was mixed with wine and ingested that way.
The use of gladiator blood was not limited to cosmetics and aphrodisiacs. Although it sounds dumb today, gladiator blood was believed to possess medicinal properties, particularly in the treatment of epilepsy. As Pliny the Elder described it: “Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators, draughts filled with life as it were; a thing that, when we see it done by the wild beasts in the same arena, inspires us with horror at the spectacle! And yet these persons consider it a most effective cure for their disease, to drink he warm, breathing, blood from man himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life; and this, though it is regarded as an act of impiety to apply the human lips to the wound even of a wild beast!”
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
