‘With a Turned Thumb’, by Jean Leon Gerome, 1872. Wikimedia
Gladiator Blood Was Highly Prized as a Health Cure
Gladiator blood was also highly sought after. Many women applied the blood of their favorite gladiators to coat their jewelry, combs, wigs, and other accoutrements, or mixed it with their cosmetics. Gladiators were seen as particularly virile, which led to the somewhat ghoulish and macabre practice of using gladiator 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. Gladiator blood’s usefulness was not limited to cosmetics and aphrodisiacs. It was also believed to have health benefits, particularly in treating 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 the 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!”
Victorian women – contemporaries thought train speeds would make their uteruses fly out of their bodies. Clinica da Mama
Victorians Thought Fast Trains Would Make Women’s Uteruses Fly Out of Their Bodies
When trains first entered service in the nineteenth century, many feared that their speed would prove lethal to passengers. New locomotives, such as the pioneering Rocket, built by Robert Stephenson in 1829, were capable of maximum speeds of 28 mph. Quite slow, by today’s standards, but until 1829, it is unlikely that any humans had ever experienced such speeds – unless they were falling off a cliff or the such. The perceived risk of such unprecedented velocities was not limited to the consequences of a crash or derailment. Naysayers – including many doctors – theorized that human physiology could not withstand travel at speeds faster than those of a galloping horse. Train alarmists reasoned that passengers’ internal organs would get compressed against their backs, with potentially lethal results.
Early trains, circa 1830. Wikimedia
Women were thought to be especially at risk, as it was feared that high train speeds would blow their uteruses out of their bodies. The paranoia about train speeds killing people with G forces eventually receded. Trains proliferated, and nobody died because their hearts or lungs were flattened against their backs, and no women had their uteruses fly out of their bodies. However, the early fears were replaced by another bizarre fear, this one of a danger to mental health instead of physical health. By the 1850s, Victorians worried that the steadily increasing train speeds, combined with the rattle and jarring motions within railway cars, injured passengers’ brains and drove people insane.
Victorians thought trains made people crazy. Atlas Obscura
Victorians Thought Train Rides Were Hazardous to Mental Health
Sensationalist media whipped up the frenzy. An illustrative example occurred in 1865, during a train journey from Carnforth to Liverpool in England. An armed passenger went crazy and attacked windows 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, only to calm down once more when the train stopped at the next station. The pattern frenzy while the train was in motion, then calming down when it slowed down and stopped, was repeated until the train reached Liverpool.
The day’s newspapers and mental health professionals linked that nutjob’s bouts of madness to train travel. However, rather than reason that he was a mentally disturbed individual, for whom train travel was a trigger, they concluded that train travel caused his mental illness. The belief persisted, well into the twentieth century, that the speed and motion of trains drove people mad. The pattern of flawed analysis that confused causation with correlation repeated 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 for causing the craziness.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
