Using Metallic Elements in their Raw form to Fight off Disease
Lined up against some of the other remedies that had become fashionable in Tudor times (for example drinking the blood of a black cat’s tail, or killing a wild boar with a stone before throwing said stone over your house) you’d have to say that the simple application of silver or mercury ranked as “pretty sensible” on the medical scale of stupidity. The antibacterial properties of silver had long been recognized – the Phoenecians stored perishables in silver bottles to make them last longer, for example – so its later use to disinfect liquids or to treat burns was a pretty good idea, although admittedly a prohibitively expensive one.
Mercury, however, caused a few more problems. Having been erroneously accepted as the standard method of treating syphilis, the rapid spread of the disease across Europe (following an outbreak amongst French troops attacking Naples in 1494) led to thousands of people swallowing the stuff, rubbing it into their skin, injecting it or, most notably, sticking it in a box, putting their head in the same box and lighting a fire underneath in order to inhale the mercurial vapours. The latter was by far the least likely to actually get rid of the syphilis, but ironically also the least likely to kill you through extreme toxicity. Syphilis blessed its victims with a bad enough cocktail of symptoms without adding mercury-induced deformity and death to the mix; these days, it has been firmly established that mercury and medicine don’t really mix.
Attempting to Amuse Oneself Using Two Pins and a Hat
The games and activities that amuse one generation of kids are inevitably looked at with scorn and derision by the next. Just as children of the future will have scant interest in GoGo’s Crazy Bones or Catcha Beast, you tend not to find the youth of today arguing over possession of Beanie Babies (see Creating a Thriving Sub-economy Based on the Resale of Beanie Babies), thrashing away at a whip and top, suggesting a quick game of Buckaroo or asking each other “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?”
But as those parents who have watched their children playing excitedly with the cardboard box that once contained a games console will testify, fun can often be found in the unlikeliest of places. And in Renaissance Britain, that fun was derived from two pins – and the action was so compelling that children were still playing push-pin a couple of hundred years later. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote in the late eighteenth century that “the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry … Everybody can play at push-pin; poetry and music are relished only by a few.” This is probably rewarding push-pin with greater praise than it actually deserves; if you fancy recreating it at home, put a hat on the floor, put two pins on the hat, and take it in turns to knock the hat until the two pins are crossing. If you manage it, you win. It’s perhaps surprising that Bentham didn’t go on to say “But then again, push-pin is boring, requires virtually no skill and doesn’t even give the participants any exercise” – but he probably had better things to be writing about.
Teetering Around on a Pair of Chopines, the Renaissance Platform Shoe
We normally associate the platform shoe with the 1970s, when the act of strapping on a pair and walking with trepidation down the high street was more an act of mild rebellion than an attempt to make yourself look taller than you actually were. You didn’t achieve a higher social status by wearing more enormous platforms – in fact, probably the opposite; wearing bigger platforms merely meant that you were a bigger fan of Gary Glitter (see Covering up Foul Odours in the Hope it would Ward Off Disease) or maybe even Gary Glitter yourself.
But the first surge in popularity of the platform shoe was in Renaissance Europe, where women chose to interpret height as an indication of social superiority – and as with the ruff (see Heating your Dinner by Boiling it in a Plastic Bag) things got a bit out of hand. Some of these “chopines” were as much as twenty inches high, and while this may have given the wearer a fleeting boost to their self-image, this would have quickly evaporated when they had to start moving. Two servants were generally required to assist with getting the things on, and at least one of them would have to hang around to act as a leaning post while the woman made her tortuously unstable way down the street. One writer of the time posited that they must have been invented by “jealous husbands who hoped that … it would make illicit liaisons difficult”; another, Thomas Coryate, pronounced that chopines were “so uncomely a thing, that it is a pity this foolish custom is not clean banished”. Laws didn’t need to be passed, however; at some point it was collectively decided that twisted ankles were too much of a price to pay for appearing to be a bit taller, and shoe normality resumed. For the time being.
Accusing Pretty Much Every Unusual Woman of being a Witch
Despite what modern-day self-styled witches might like to announce proudly on their business cards, there’s no such thing as witchcraft. But this enlightened idea hadn’t yet occurred to the vast majority of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who would tend to lay the blame for any mishap – be it disease, drought or accidentally shutting your arm in a door – on any random local woman who might exhibit signs of being a bit witchy. Woe betide you if you kept yourself to yourself, or had some kind of visible birthmark, or owned a cat, or were prone to laughing manically for no apparent reason; because rather like trial by ordeal (see Wearing Ruffs so Big that Especially Long Spoons had to be Produced) once someone had accused you of being a witch, that was pretty much the end.
Encouraged by the papacy – and particularly Pope Innocent VIII – witch hunting quickly escalated into mass hysteria, with millions of God-fearing citizens becoming incredibly worried that this non-existent coven of evil women were about to overthrow Christianity. In 1541 witchcraft was made punishable by death in England, with the laws tightened further by Elizabeth I in 1563 and James I in 1604; crucially, the new laws left the witch’s belongings to the crown, which made local officials incredibly keen to slaughter as many funny-looking but perfectly innocent women as possible. If they couldn’t find a damning birthmark on the woman, they’d claim that she’d made it invisible. If the woman exhibited any kind of fear during interrogation, she was definitely a witch, while if she remained stoic and unflinching, that meant she was a witch, too. It wasn’t until 1735 that George II made a crucial modification to the law, making it an offence for anyone to pretend to be a witch. Because witches didn’t exist. This didn’t help the thousands of non-witches who had already been needlessly slaughtered by paranoid conspiracy theorists, but better late than never.
Look at a Freak, or Play Hide-and-seek: 1650–1900
It’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-year period during which so many profound changes happened in the Western world that it seems almost insulting to lump it all together. At the beginning of it, England was embroiled in a civil war which would eventually establish the way the country would be governed up to the present day, and similar upheavals would subsequently take place across Europe – most notably at the hand of Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, take it as read that brutal wars were being fought constantly, everywhere, between groups of people over something or other; a gross simplification, sure, but it allows us to ponder the positives – such as the abolition of slavery, the establishment of some kind of social justice, and, of course, the Industrial Revolution.
This last development wasn’t to everyone’s tastes – not least the children who were forced to work down mineshafts, or the Luddites whose job losses caused them to violently set about new-fangled machinery with sticks and axes. But it resulted in an incredible harnessing of the world’s resources, helped to establish great cities, and stopped us once and for all from having to thresh grain by bashing it on the floor. In general we became more healthy, more worldly – even more Romantic. But this didn’t stop us, say, placing bets on how many rats in a sack could be killed by a dog in a minute, or injecting our faces with wax as a precursor to Botox. Would we never learn?
Being Terrified of what Might Happen to you if you Ma
sturbated
It’s a cheap, accessible and hugely popular leisure activity amongst humans of all creeds and colours, but its perpetual association with guilt and shame means that you rarely see people happily masturbating at bus stops, in libraries or at family barbecues. Of course, that’s for the best for all kinds of reasons – but for many centuries there was a concerted effort to get people to stop doing it in private, too, by feeding them a whole heap of untruths about the consequences of their actions. Pamphlets and books doing the rounds in Britain and Europe in the eighteenth century described the heinous act as one of “self-pollution”, which would not only scar you mentally but also lead to a loss of strength, memory and, indeed, vision.
Victorian conservatism saw boys’ trouser pockets aligned to prevent secretive fiddling, while girls were dissuaded from riding horses or bicycles lest they experience any slightly pleasurable sensations. Even by the turn of the twentieth century, John Harvey Kellogg – the eccentric American inventor of cornflakes – was still describing masturbation as worse than the plague, war or smallpox, and many followed his advice that compulsive masturbators be treated with bland diets, the tying of their hands, and even electric shock therapy. Before secretly retiring to a private room and cracking off a quick one.
Making Paper Impressions of Brass Plaques
From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it became fashionable in Europe to commemorate someone’s life by having a monumental brass commissioned that might feature them and their families going about their everyday business, and would be kept by the church to serve as a memorial. In Europe, most of these were destroyed during the Lutheran Reformation, but in Britain some four thousand of them survived as a peculiar historical record, giving us an indication of costume and habits of not just the nobility but also the emerging middle classes.
But simply going to have a look at these brasses wasn’t enough for Victorian historians; they wished to imprint them in their memory by making a copy on paper using a ball of coloured wax to make a rubbing. And for some reason, this hobby quickly caught on, to the extent that the numbers of people queuing outside churches in the hope of taking away a waxy facsimile forced vicars to start levying a small charge for the privilege. It ticked many of the boxes for a wildly popular hobby – it didn’t require exceptional skill, you could compare your collections with other people, and it didn’t break the bank. But it was also deadly dull, and doomed to be replaced by racier pastimes. The last brass-rubbing centre in Cambridge finally closed its doors in December 2000, leaving the few remaining brass rubbers to mourn the passing of a golden, if slightly boring, age.
Relating the Lumps on your Skull to the Likelihood of Marrying the Farmer’s Daughter
We’ve seen attempts to predict people’s destinies using patterns of bird flight (see Locking your Wife’s Genitalia up for safe Keeping) and sand (see Making Major Life Decisions Based on how Birds Fly Past) but by the late eighteenth century a comparatively logical decision had been made to focus on individuals themselves and see whether they might yield up any clues. A chap by the name of Franz Joseph Gall had begun to realize that mental activity took place entirely within the head, and he presented his findings in a beautifully titled book, finally published in 1819: The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, with Observations upon the possibility of ascertaining the several Intellectual and Moral Dispositions of Man and Animal, by the configuration of their Heads.
He was correct in judging the brain to be crucial to the process of thought, but he unfortunately became side-tracked by inventing a bizarre pseudo-science called phrenology, where bumps on the skull could be interpreted as having profound meaning. One raised part of the skull might reveal a flair for poetry, another for vanity, another for the likelihood that you’d knife your neighbour over a trivial argument; Franz’s theories were never widely accepted by academics, but many laymen were persuaded by the idea. They rushed to have their heads felt and their fortunes told, despite the fact that it was as pointless as having their kneecap examined, or the contents of their pocket, or indeed a complete stranger’s pocket.
Boarding up the Windows of your House in Order to Avoid Tax
The combined effects of war, mismanaged finances and general economic uselessness had forced Britain into a bit of a tight corner by the end of the seventeenth century and, as is normal in these kind of situations, the ruling classes looked to impoverished citizens to help them out of the crisis. Wary of imposing a flat per-head tax that had caused all kinds of problems in the 1300s and would do so again in 1990 (see Refusing to Pay your Taxes), the idea of a progressive tax was floated, where the wealthy would pay a little more. But the government had no easy way of determining how much individuals earned, and the population found the idea of disclosing this information to be a gross violation of privacy. So the 1696 Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money got around the problem by taxing people according to the number of windows in their house. The more windows, the bigger the house, and the more likely that they were able to pay. In theory.
Of course, the window tax was as unpopular as an income tax – not least because some windows are simply bigger than others. People did all they could to avoid it; if their house had six windows, they’d have to cough up, so they removed the sixth window. Similarly, thresholds of payment at ten and twenty windows were neatly avoided by bricking up more windows. “A tax on light and air”, howled those who had plunged themselves into darkness on a matter of principle; today, of course, our earnings are all disclosed to the government, which may be an intrusion into our private lives, but at least we don’t have to wander around our homes in semi-darkness.
Drinking Beer for Breakfast, and Encouraging your Children to do the Same
If you’re someone who enjoys having a beer with your morning cereal, it would probably be a good idea for you to put down this content and stagger your way to the nearest doctor, who will probably advise you to replace that early-morning lager with something a bit less potent. But while drinking beer first thing would inject a note of unpredictability into a twenty-first-century working day, in the days of poor sanitation – which covers the vast majority of European history – beer was by far the safest option, because brewing it involved boiling it. Which meant destroying the bugs that would have had water drinkers boarding the bad ship cholera.
Of course, this wasn’t the super-strength high-octane lager that turns British town centres into no-go areas after a certain point on a Friday night. This was low- alcohol “small beer” – a phrase that has come to mean something of little importance, but back then was pretty essential in keeping people hydrated without giving them unpleasant digestive disorders. Many employers gave their workers a dozen or so pints of beer for free each day to keep them reasonably healthy and happy, and it was the drink of choice on the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables – again, not for its flavour, but just because it wouldn’t do you any damage. Come the advent of clean water in cities, we did well to avoid scenarios where children might be tempted to drink alcohol – until the arrival of alcopops (see Putting on a Velcro Suit and Hurling yourself at a Velcro Wall).
Going for a Ride on a Penny Farthing
The precursor of the bicycle, the pedal-less velocipede, had two wheels of the same size. Today’s state-of-the-art titanium-framed bikes stick with the same concept. But for a brief period in the mid-to-late 1800s, the high bicycle – or penny farthing – with its combination of colossal front wheel and tiny rear wheel, was deemed to be a magnificent idea, and potentially the future of transportation.
It wasn’t. You can see how it came about; cycling innovators hadn’t yet grasped the idea of gears, so a single revolution of the pedals had to correspond to a single revolution of the wheel it was controlling. A bigger wheel meant more distance travelled, and thus a faster speed. But at what cost? As the rider was unable to touch the ground with his feet, sudden stops would invariably unseat him –
often causing injury – and even gentle stops would require him to dismount and go through the precarious process of getting back on the thing. Was it really worth it? Vigorous, thrusting young speed freaks of the time certainly thought so, and embraced the penny farthing as a means of showing off – the speedway or stock-car racing of its day. Everyone else decided to wait for something safer to be invented – which it was, in 1885: the first geared two-wheeler called, perhaps appropriately, the safety bicycle.
Forcing Children to Write with their Right Hand
When things go wrong, we look around for someone else to blame – and while suspicion traditionally fell on women who looked a bit witchy (see Boarding up the Windows of your House in Order to Avoid Tax) left-handed people have also spent centuries defending themselves against accusations of bringing bad luck. Even today we might double-take if we see someone writing, stirring a cake mixture or conducting an orchestra with their left hand, so it’s clearly something that’s deeply ingrained in our psyche. There are unpleasant linguistic associations with the word left in many languages, from Latin (sinister comes from sinistre meaning left) through German, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh and Mandarin Chinese, to English expressions such as “to have two left feet”. As the Catholic Church once equated being left-handed with being a servant of the devil, it’s no surprise that during god-fearing periods of European history, tendencies towards left-handed writing in children were quickly reined in. The favoured Victorian method was to tie the left hand behind the back, as if writing was some kind of involuntary spasm that could be controlled by force. But even as late as the 1980s, children in the UK were still being encouraged to write with their right hands; while this switch conceivably reduced their chances of smudging ink on the page, it almost certainly impeded their academic progress. Fortunately, famous lefties such as Lewis Carroll, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill managed, somehow, to beat the Victorian system.
The Next Big Thing Page 6