Disturbing Health & Beauty Fads From The Victorian Era | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant told you there was gonna be another one so last month i did a video about uh the victorian era and how it was utter insanity and uh i wasn't really sure how it was gonna do as a bit of a departure for this channel just a little rabbit hole that i had fallen down that i thought was really interesting i didn't know if anybody else would care about it but uh yeah it turns out it did pretty well turns out you guys are freaks too but like i said in this video there was actually a ton of stuff that i cut out of that video and saved for yet another video which is kind of unfortunate because the stuff that i cut out is actually some of the more salacious stuff i ran across because this focuses mostly on the health and beauty fads that the victorians got into and yeah if you think that the way they decorated their homes was crazy just wait till you see what they did with their own bodies [Music] one of the biggest takeaways from the last video was that the victorian era was a period of transition where old ways collided with new ways to produce a very interesting time and one of the places where that becomes the most obvious is in their understanding of disease you know in some ways they were improving their knowledge by leaps and bounds but with new knowledge requires an understanding of how to implement that knowledge which they did not have at all and because of that number one their medicine was completely insane have you ever heard anybody say that they know just enough about something to be dangerous yeah that was the entire medical field during the victorian era i talked about this a little bit in my video about john harvey kellogg which is definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it but yeah medicine in the victorian age the late 1800s or so was very much a throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks approach yeah that's the one where i talk about the doctor that had a cure for male infertility where he implanted goat testicles into guys scrotums it's a real thing that happened so the germ theory of medicine was pretty much brand new but they still didn't really have ways of combating it antibiotics were still quite a ways off but they had figured out how to extract drugs from plants that that makes you feel better so so they did that a lot and from that you get things like cocaine toothache drops which you could buy over the counter cocaine was actually in a lot of stuff back then again did a whole video on that i feel like i'm going to reference a lot of my old videos in this i seem to go back to this well quite a bit because they were insane it was in the same time period and one of the most popular items of the day for parents anyway was mrs winslow's soothing syrup it was something that they gave to kids who couldn't sleep or were teething and the reason it was so popular is because it worked within a few minutes of giving this to a kid they were calm and quiet laid out it was it was like a miracle i'm sorry did i say miracle i meant morphine it was morphine yeah you know how in saving private ryan when the medic knew that a soldier wasn't going to make it he would basically euthanize him by injecting a bunch of morphine into him yeah it was it was that for kids okay i'm exaggerating a little but it was morphine similarly if you're a lady of the day and you're dealing with painful menstrual cramps and whatnot the ponds tampon company has just the thing for you because they dip their tampons in opium and belladonna extract belladonna also known as deadly nightshade because it's poisonous but it does cause muscles to relax so the opium would get rid of the pain and the belladonna would cause the muscles to stop cramping so yeah i mean it was almost a good idea actually i'm sure it worked wonders in the short term but for the long term i mean well there's a reason you don't see them on the shelves today now one thing the victorian doctors were really into at the time was phrenology which was the idea that the shape of your head determined what kind of person you were and what kind of health you had they had maps of the human head with various areas dedicated to different personality traits and it was thought if your skull had bumps along those spots then it was an indicator of what kind of person you were this was especially used to determine criminality it was thought that they could tell by the shape of your skull whether you had inherent criminal traits and they would actually use this to put some people in asylums in fact the guy who invented mugshots first started doing it as a way to sort of figure out certain facial characteristics that were common amongst criminals the idea being that if you could figure out these common traits then police could you know arrest people before they commit crimes it was only later that they realized that it was helpful in identifying repeat offenders so they kept doing it and as i've talked about before body snatching was big at the time yet donating your body to science wasn't really a thing back then so medical schools kind of relied on engraved robbers to go and dig people out of graves that were fresh in the ground which is why you sometimes see old graves of like iron bars around them it wasn't to to prevent vampires from coming up or zombies as some people say it was to keep grave robbers from getting into the graves but perhaps the craziest health fat occurred right at the end of the victorian age when radioactivity was discovered in 1896. they discovered what it was but they didn't know that it caused cancer and the way they found out that it caused cancer was because they put it in everything you know they saw this natural energy coming out of rocks so surely if you put that in your body it would give you them and vega so yeah they put radium and make up thorium and toothpaste uh you could take radium and pills you could drink it in a drink called retithor and if you want a real kick out of it you can drink it out of a uranium glass girls working with radium and factory started getting sick the famous radium girls i've talked about before and people that were drinking that ratathor began to notice that it was starting to eat through their jaw bones and in the case of amateur golfer even byers his jaw fell off this is an actual guy who drank three bottles of ratathor a day for years probably wasn't the glow he was going for now this was about a decade or so after the victorian era would officially end but victorians they sacrificed a lot for beauty as well number two they did some crazy stuff to look good today if you were to come home to find your lady friend standing in front of you on a corset and lace stockings and high heels friend you better put that chalupa down because she's got other plans in the victorian age that would have been tuesday victorian women wore corsets all the time sometimes even in their sleep in an attempt to cinch their waist down as small as possible now this is still done today don't get me wrong there's whole communities of people that are into this kind of thing and that's cool do you but the victorians took it to extremes they were obsessed with it like this is where that whole thing about women fainting because they get surprised came from the idea being that they were so cinched in that their blood pressure would jump when you know their heart rate increased and they would pass out it's debated still whether or not this was really a thing but it's talked about but yeah to the victorians there was nothing more important than having a tiny waist which they would exaggerate by putting a bustle underneath their dress more on crazy fashion stuff later but yeah something else that they were really into was was having a doe-eyed look uh to go along with their ant wastes and so what they would do to create a doe-eyed look was going back to that old belladonna they would put belladonna juice in their eyes but i feel the need to reiterate that belladonna is poisonous and many women went blind doing this they'd also apparently put lemon and orange juice in their eyes because they thought that the sting meant that it was it was cleaning their eyes when it was actually the acid eating away at their corneas they also really valued pale skin the wider the better because that was associated with wealth because if you didn't have a lot of money and you had to work then you'd probably be working outside the sun would beat down on you and darken your skin but if you were wealthy you didn't have to work you could just you know sit on the couch in your living room eating bonbons with pale ass so soaps often promise to whiten your skin they would use white makeup but if you're really dedicated to that pale life you'd eat arsenic complexion wafers yes arsenic the thing that wound up in their wallpaper as i talked about in the last video killed thousands of them well they also openly consumed it in arsenic complexion wafers the idea being that in low doses arsenic can limit your body's ability to produce red blood cells you know like a dying person but less red blood cells under the skin meant paler skin because we all know anemia is the sexiest disease these extreme beauty hacks are of course mostly aimed at women but if you feel sorry for the women of the age right now just wait it gets worse number three women had it rough okay so i talked a second ago about the corset craze of the victorian era it turns out that's actually a pretty good metaphor because women were pretty squeezed for options during that day i'm sure it's a surprise to nobody to know that the women of the victorian era had fewer rights than they do today but just to give an idea of how controlled they were consider annette kellerman she was an australian actress who got arrested in the early 1900s for going to a beach in an inappropriately revealing outfit oh my god oh my i'm sorry i didn't realize that was i hope this doesn't get demonetized but seriously women in the victorian era were expected to be in full skirts and pantaloons at the beach and you could only remove the skirt when you were in waste-up water and then you had to put it back on before you got out and in the meantime i guess you just held on to it but in fact many beaches provided little changing rooms on wheels that they called bathing machines where you'd get in on the beach fully dressed they'd wheel you out into the water you would change clothes on the way and then you could exit on the other side and swim in privacy which is especially funny we consider that most of the beaches were segregated by gender like men weren't even allowed on the same beaches the women whatever but sexually they were crazy repressed back then both the men and the women but especially the women like sex was only supposed to be for procreation even for married couples you were not supposed to enjoy it it was considered unseemly and for a woman to enjoy sex even with her husband in fact they they believe that women couldn't have orgasms in pretty much any kind of female unhappiness was labeled hysteria and the doctors had a way of relieving this hysteria it was called a pelvic massage again i covered this in a previous video but a pelvic massage was where a doctor would have a woman lay down and then he would manipulate her downstairs with his hand until she had a release of hysteria not an orgasm we all know they can't have orgasms no it was a release of hysteria yeah how bad was it for women back then victorian days um an orgasm was a medical procedure that's how bad it was it was also the small problem that many women back in the day were just considered property to their husbands or their fathers in fact men who wanted a divorce but couldn't afford a divorce had the option of selling their wives and this was actually done at a public auction just like livestock and whoever it is that won this auction got to have this wife this was now his wife and she had no choice in the matter this was actually documented in the thomas hardy novel the mayor of castro bridge and if you're really ready to have your mind blown this wasn't that long ago the last recorded case of this was in leeds in 1913. there are people alive today that were around when it was legal to sell your wife but i don't know maybe as a way to sort of deal with that whole situation women of victorian days indulged in some pretty crazy fashion there's the aforementioned corset and tiny waist craze that i was talking about but yeah they would also include a bustle the bustle was a little wire floof that they would put right above their butt that would cause the dress to kind of flare out behind them kind of made it look like they just farted it served other purposes it kept the tips of the dress off the ground and i guess depending on how you look at it it could be seen as an act of modesty like it's hiding their actual figure or the exact opposite it's supposed to be like a you know victorian dump truck but believe it or not this was a minimized version of something that came before it really popular in the 1850s to 1870s women wore these steel cages under the dresses called crinolines that flared the dress out up to six feet wide it was a ridiculous fashion and it was criticized at the time as well but its merits are debated some women enjoyed wearing them because it kept their legs cooler with all the heavy material lifted off of them it kind of created this space underneath there that meant they could move their legs around a little easier maybe walk around a bit more and the white dresses gave them more personal space and kept the creepers off at the parties but on the other side they were big and bulky and put women in literal cages but the worst thing was say it with me they killed a lot of people crinolines caught fire constantly homes at the time were heated and lit by fireplaces and candles and you can imagine trying to navigate around a space like that with a giant dress that flares out that wide and knocking stuff over and the dress by the way was made of very flammable material in fact it's estimated around 3 000 women died every year from dress fires on a lighter note one popular trend in the 1800s was for women to wear hats with birds on them and i don't mean patterns of birds i mean an actual dead bird and jewelry made out of insects was popular for a while too especially beetles but one last thing about women in the victorian age they did find one other way to sort of rebel against the system and everything that was going on and i did not see this coming before i found it when i was doing research for this but nipple rings were popular yeah they called them bosom rings and they started in paris and kind of made their way around as a little sneaky act of rebellion but it was mostly popular amongst the aristocracy and the wealthier women because they knew that if somehow they got caught they wouldn't be punished like people in the lower classes would on that note let's go from nipple rings to haircuts number four barbershop quartets got started for horrifying reasons okay so barbershop quartets as we think of them today with the outfits and the harmonies and all that that actually got started after the victorian era mostly coming from african-american slave songs and harmonies and whatnot but the origin of a barbershop quartet did kind of get its start in the victorian days and the reason that this got started is amazing so many of you may know that way back in the day barbers were a lot more than just people who cut hair they were kind of like the town's surgeons in fact they were called barber surgeons and what separated them from doctors doctors would you know determine what a disease was and and offer pulses and herbs to take you know that kind of thing but if anything needed to be opened up or any blood needed to come out that's what the barber surgeon did steve martin fans might remember the saturday night live sketch theodore barber of york that's that's kind of how it was you know medicine is not an exact science but we're learning all the time why why just 50 years ago we would have thought your daughter's illness was brought on by demonic possession or witchcraft but nowadays we know that isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors perhaps caused by a toad or small dwarf living in her stomach eventually medical knowledge advanced to the point where surgeons kind of became their own thing but even up into the victorian days barbers did things like bloodlettings and and said bronze that had been broken and even did some minor dentistry i guess you could say they were like the doc in the box of their day like instead of going to the emergency room going to like an urgent care facility but this was also as i've talked about in a previous video a time before anesthetic so getting a tooth pulled or getting a bone set was an incredibly painful experience an experience which would often lead to screaming and you know what's bad for business the sound of somebody screaming in pain from inside your business so barbers would encourage those that were waiting their turn to play music they would put instruments in the waiting room for them to to play and they would sing along with like call and response songs and shanties and whatnot and if they could afford it they would hire groups of people to stand outside of their shops to sing for the passersby to cover up the sound of the screaming from the inside and this is where barbershop quartets were born and number five they ate mummies yeah there's this factoid going around i've seen it here and there that um there's actually a shortage of egyptian mummies in the world that is actually kind of rare to find them these days because the majority of egyptian mummies that have ever been found have been eaten by victorians for the record that is a wild exaggeration but it's also not much of a lie so again the victorian time was this weird mix of terrible new ideas and terrible old ideas so while some people were drinking irradiated water and causing their jaws to fall off uh there was also this common belief going way way back that ground up egyptian mummies had medicinal properties according to a 17th century physician dr robert james mummies or mummia as it was known could serve as a blood thinner painkiller cough suppressant anti-inflammatory menstrual aid and promotes wound healing yeah spoiler warning it does none of those things so this falls into the category of medicinal cannibalism and this goes back literally thousands of years way back in the day it was believed that you would gain a person's strength by eating part of their body in fact when roman gladiators were killed people would often go down with scarves and soak up the blood and and drink their blood to try to gain strength from it and the mommy thing specifically it's thought that it might have actually come from a bit of a misunderstanding or a mistranslation of the word bitumen bitumen or bitumen i've heard it pronounced both ways it's it's basically the same as asphalt it's this pitchy black sticky goo that is made out of hydrocarbons the same way oil is so it's very abundant in the middle east and it does have some medicinal properties that's antibacterial so you can put it on a wound and it'll prevent it from becoming infected so bitumen has gone by different names over the years but it was a 10th century persian physician named raza that named it mumia after the word mum which was which is the word for wax because it was sticky and that's where the term money came from because when europeans first found these egyptian mummies they had this sort of black coating around them and they assumed that it was this mumia substance and they were right and wrong about that earlier egyptian mummies were actually covered with resin which would get blackened and hardened over time now later mummies did actually use bitumen when it became more mainstream and it wasn't just royalty that was getting this done but it was the more sort of commoner people that were being embalmed with bitumen which is kind of ironic because one of the reasons why people consumed egyptian mummies and powdered form and everything again was because they thought that they were taking in their greatness because because they thought they were all royalty but the bitty men that they were actually getting was from the commoners and they also used mumia and paint to create a color called mummy brown which i guess is better than having arsenic in it so while they didn't eat most of the mummies in the world they did definitely consume some egyptian mummies but there was a bit of a just mummy craze that went on in the victorian days after napoleon invaded egypt in 1798 he brought some mummies back with him and this sort of stirred everybody's imaginations went through this big whole egypt phase egyptomania is what it was called and mummies from egypt began to just flood the european continent for the next coming decades and this led to mummy unwrapping parties you know that thing where you invite a whole bunch of people over and sit brandy while you desecrate the actual human body of a person it was that kind of thing but no these were pretty much exactly what they sound like especially high level aristocrats would have people over they would maybe show off some of the trinkets and stuff that came from the tomb that they acquired they would pass around drinks and then the main event they would bring the mummy out they'd put on the table and unwrap the mummy and eventually reveal this face that had not been seen for millennia some found this to be strangely beautiful others were horrified by it and it was also common to find um jewelry and trinkets and stuff hidden in the bandages of these egyptian mummies that was part of their funerary process so they would take these little trinkets and just kind of hand them out as party favors that people could take home and some people made whole careers out of this like thomas pettigrew who was a well-known surgeon who had so many of these mummy wrapping parties and unwrapped so many mummies over his time that he actually became a bit of an expert in it in fact he wrote a book called the history of egyptian mummies in 1834 that went on to become a big hit although in his studies of these mummies he took the opportunity to measure their skulls to try to prove that they were actually caucasians and not arabs or africans because of course he did you mean somebody assuming that an ancient non-white civilization couldn't have possibly built great things i'm glad nobody does that anymore egyptomania went on for a large part of the 1800s but it did eventually begin to wane because the field of archaeology first of all it kind of became more regulated and and uh not such a free-for-all anymore and you know people just kind of got used to it you know seen one mummy you've seen them all but still all over europe and the united states for that matter thousands of mummies have been unceremoniously displayed in museums and curiosity shops and side shows never having been returned to the tombs that they came from but hey at least they weren't eaten so there's a lot more that i could add to this video but i think you get the idea you know just like their engineering and and scientific knowledge their medical knowledge took huge leaps and bounds during the victorian age like i talked about jon snow in the last video and how he was the guy who figured out that cholera was waterborne and kind of led to the german theory of disease well it turns out he was also one of the people who cracked anesthesiology so for the first time in history people could get surgeries done and not be in unbearable pain and i don't think we can conceptualize what a big deal that is i mean yes obviously it's less painful but what that meant was back then people wouldn't get things done that needed to be done little minor surgeries that would be nothing today thousands of people died from regularly back then and maybe an even bigger thing is that surgeons could take their time to get everything right because there wasn't somebody screaming in pain while they were doing it like before anesthesia a good surgeon was the one who did it the fastest like that's all that mattered and the fastest surgeon of his day and i'm going to assume of all time was a guy named robert liston he was famous for being able to amputate a leg in less than five minutes his record was 28 seconds but before you cheer him on too much he also performed the only surgery in history that had a 300 mortality rate yeah he was doing a leg amputation and he was going so fast that he accidentally cut off two of his assistant's fingers and somebody watching got so horrified that they had a heart attack and died and then later both his assistant and the patient died of infection so yeah 300 mortality rate so yeah who else is happy to be alive today of course one of the biggest discoveries of the victorian age was how to harness and manipulate electricity this is something that took humanity thousands of years to understand but you could probably figure it out in one afternoon if you check out the electricity and magnetism course on brilliant learn all about maxwell's field equations which kickstarted the electrical revolution as well as coulomb's law faraday's law goss's law there's a lot of laws but don't worry this isn't a legal course brilliant teaches you with exclusive animations and interactive puzzles that make it all simple and more important fun by the time you're done you'll have a whole new outlook on all the electrical gadgets you have around you and a new appreciation for the electricity that powers them from there you can check out brilliant's other courses on everything from computer science to basic algebra to competition math logic scientific fundamentals you name it and if you haven't checked out brilliant lately there's a lot more to see with new courses being added all the time and more interactive puzzles to make understanding the concepts easier than ever before and if you want to get a taste of what i'm talking about they have free daily brain teasers and you can do the first section of any of their courses for free so you can see what they're all about but if you do sign up for one of their premium subscriptions it gives you access to all their courses and you're one of the first 200 people to do so you can get 20 off if you go to brilliant.org slash answers with joe it's just a great way to learn things and like i said they've been adding a lot of really cool stuff so if you haven't checked it out in a while now might be a good time to do it so yeah brilliant.org slice answers with joe link's down in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the patreon supporters the answer files that are helping to keep this channel going keep the lights out around here forming an awesome community and just being overall really nice people i got some people i need a shout out real quick gotta murder some names we've got desiree gallo andrew newton arv svenning jordy fitzgerald joe coletti poe t wang and and theodore wilson old friend coming back good to see you uh if you would like to join them get early access to videos exclusive live streams and just be a part of an awesome community you can go to patreon.com please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here there's another one it's just as good as this one might even be better it'll blow your mind google thinks you'll like it they know a lot or you can check out any of the other videos that might come up that i might face on them and if you enjoy them and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there and have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

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Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021