We can all agree that our way of life has changed in some pretty astonishing ways over the years. The fact that 10 things common in the past seem utterly alien today shows just how far humanity has traveled. Technological breakthroughs and a deeper grasp of biology have paved the way for a world that would have been pure fantasy for our forebears.

Why 10 Things Common Reveal Our Past

Understanding these once‑everyday practices helps us appreciate the strange, often hazardous, realities our ancestors navigated. Let’s dive into a roster of ten practices that were once as ordinary as brushing your teeth.

10 Legal Drug Use

During the U.S. Civil War, an astonishing 400,000 soldiers were reported to be hooked on opiates. Back then, many believed that injecting drugs straight into a vein would prevent addiction because the substance wouldn’t touch the stomach – a notion that sounds wildly misguided today.

From ancient times onward, mood‑altering substances were readily available, often without a physician’s prescription. Women, labeled the “weaker sex,” were flooded with these remedies for a bewildering array of supposed ailments. Unsurprisingly, women’s addiction rates were three times higher than men’s.

Some of the most outlandish “conditions” treated with drugs included sexual exhaustion, ticklishness, cracked nipples, boredom, homesickness, hysteria, and even vomiting during pregnancy. Cocaine injections were administered to make women “lively and talkative,” and “oxygen parties” featuring nitrous oxide were a fashionable pastime.

9 Being Operated On By Your Barber

Need a shave, a haircut, and perhaps a toe amputation? In the past, the local barber‑surgeon’s shop offered all of those services under one roof. A fresh bowl of blood in the window or a red‑and‑white striped pole outside signaled that you were in the right place – red for blood, white for bandages.

Medical treatments back then could be downright terrifying. Bloodletting was a staple service: barbers would open veins to drain blood or attach leeches. Unfortunately, many “surgeons” couldn’t tell when to stop, leading to dangerous blood loss. Trepanning – drilling a hole in the skull – was also popular for headaches, abscesses, dementia, mental illness, and to release supposed evil spirits. All of this often happened while the patient was fully awake, with no anesthesia. And let’s not forget amputations performed by the same barber‑surgeons.

At that time, the causes of disease were mysterious. People blamed everything from demons and stars to sin, witchcraft, and even foul smells for spreading illness.

8 Capital Punishment As Entertainment

Public executions in medieval times were staged like theatrical events, drawing massive crowds to demonstrate that crime would not be tolerated. Rumor has it that authorities even declared public holidays to boost attendance, turning the grim spectacle into a bizarre form of entertainment.

Hanging was the most common method, so much so that many towns erected permanent gibbets in central squares. After the execution, the corpse might be taken away immediately or left hanging until it turned to dust, serving as a stark reminder of law and order.

Decapitation was another favored punishment, especially for nobles. If the executioner’s axe or sword was dull, the condemned could endure multiple blows – a convicted countess reportedly needed ten strikes before the fatal one. Heads were sometimes impaled on stakes and displayed indefinitely, reinforcing the power of the state.

7 Grave Robbing In The Name Of Science

While funerals were meant to honor the dead, the Renaissance era saw a disturbing twist: the dead were sometimes exhumed for scientific study. As anatomy became essential to medical progress, a shortage of cadavers emerged, prompting a grim market for fresh bodies.

Initially, executed criminals supplied most of the bodies. When demand outpaced supply, professional body snatchers began digging up graves under cover of darkness, often the night after burial, to sell the still‑fresh corpses to anatomists. When even they couldn’t keep up, medical students sometimes stole bodies themselves, and in the most desperate cases, corpses were hijacked from funeral processions.

Even Leonardo da Vinci got involved, dissecting numerous cadavers and producing exquisitely detailed drawings that dramatically advanced medical education.

6 Challenging Someone To A Duel

The gauntlet was thrown, and the challenge was issued: “I duel you.” Acceptance meant picking up the glove, after which the combatants arranged the time, place, and weapon – initially swords, later rapiers, and eventually pistols.

Dueling became a fashionable way for refined gentlemen to defend honor and reputation for centuries. Insults that sparked duels were often trivial – a comment about clothing could be enough. Strict codes of conduct aimed to prevent fatal outcomes, though they weren’t always successful.

In ancient times, judges sometimes ordered “trial by battle,” where two parties fought to let divine will decide the dispute.

5 Extremely Slow, Dangerous Travel

Getting from point A to point B in medieval times was a Herculean task. A traveler on foot could cover roughly 24‑40 km (15‑25 mi) a day; on horseback, 32‑48 km (20‑30 mi). Sailing, when possible, was faster, averaging 120‑200 km (75‑125 mi) per day.

Beyond distance, travelers faced countless hazards: lack of inns forced many to sleep outdoors, food could spoil, accidents or illness could strike, and robbery was a constant threat. Sea voyages were equally perilous, as wooden ships often couldn’t endure violent storms.

4 Brutal Punishment For Committing Adultery

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter dramatizes the plight of a Puritan woman forced to wear a scarlet “A” after an affair. In reality, such punishments were brutally real. Women caught committing adultery were publicly whipped, sometimes twice – first in their own community, then in the town where the crime occurred.

Beyond whipping, adulterous women were forced to wear the letters “AD” on their clothing, driven through town in a cart while being scourged, and in extreme cases even executed. Men, by contrast, faced the lesser charge of fornication, reflecting a gendered double standard that painted women as temptresses.

3 All In The Name Of Beauty

Beauty standards have shifted dramatically over the centuries. In the mid‑1400s, elite women were prized for high, dome‑shaped foreheads and porcelain‑white skin. To achieve the coveted look, they plucked hair from their hairlines, sometimes using rough stones or chemical burns to erase any stray strands.

Eyebrows and eyelashes were also frequently removed. Pale skin was a status symbol, so wealthy women avoided sun exposure and applied cosmetics made from mercury, pearls, silver, or crushed egg shells. Some used white flour, chalk, or lead powder mixed with olive oil, sealing the mixture with a thin coat of egg white to prolong the effect.

2 To Bathe Or Not To Bathe

During the Middle Ages, people bathed more often than they did in the Renaissance. Then, physicians oddly argued that immersing oneself in water made one vulnerable to disease, believing that opening pores released vital forces.

Renaissance society still prized cleanliness, especially among the elite. Hand basins allowed frequent washing of hands and faces, while heavy perfumes masked odors. Scented towels were rubbed over the body, and linen undergarments were changed regularly to maintain a semblance of hygiene.

1 Excessive And Deadly Childbirth

In the Renaissance, a married woman’s primary duty was to bear children, a task that claimed many lives. Childbirth was the leading cause of death for young women, with some mothers experiencing eight to twelve deliveries, and a few enduring twenty or more. The sheer frequency of births dramatically increased the risk of complications and mortality.

Midwives, whose knowledge came solely from previous generations of women, handled everything from routine deliveries to breech births, emergency baptisms for dying infants, and even cesarean sections when the mother perished during labor.

Quite simply, some people don’t know how to handle money, and having a lot of money can be a recipe for disaster. While the money management blues could be because of ineptitude or bad luck, the common denominator is that these wealthy people would have been better off with less. Here are 10 people who should never have become rich.

10 A Fall from Grace

Eike Batista is not a rags-to-riches story since Batista’s father had been the Minister of Mines and Energy in two previous Brazilian governments. It was natural that Eike Batista made his living in mining, gas, and oil with his family background. It was then a logical step to finance large-scale infrastructure projects that would support his other concerns.

At the beginning of 2012, Batista had a net worth of around $35 billion—this meant that he was the seventh wealthiest person in the world. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in the world’s top ten. By the summer of 2013, his wealth stood at $200 million and, a year later, had fallen to minus $1 billion.

There were various reasons for this dramatic drop, but not all of them were Batista’s fault. A general downturn in the precious metals industry, underperforming assets, and poor decisions played a part. But the biggest fall from grace may be that Batista is facing 30 years in jail for bribing the governor of Rio de Janeiro.

So why should Batista never have become rich? The answer is simple. A capitalist economy relies on the operation of free markets that depend on trust. Someone who builds a business empire built on sand warps the economy, destroys confidence, and wipes out the investments that pay people’s pensions.

9 From Bad to Worse

Jack Whittaker didn’t need to win the lottery; the West Virginian was a wealthy and successful businessman in the construction industry. But, in 2002, he won the then-largest jackpot in the Powerball multi-state lottery. His prize was worth around $315 million, but he opted to take the one-off cash payment option that left him with over $113 million after taxes.

Whittaker was kind-hearted and well-meaning as he pledged 10% of his winnings to Christian charities and set up the Jack Whittaker Foundation to distribute food and clothing to the needy in rural West Virginia. He also rewarded the man who worked in the store where Whittaker had bought the winning ticket and threw handfuls of cash from his new sports car around the neighborhood.

Then things started to go bad. In 2003, someone stole over $500,000 that Whittaker had left in his car in the parking lot of a strip club. Not a good look Whittaker, but things kept going from bad to worse.

Next, his teenage granddaughter, Brandi, was lavished with cash and gifts, but in 2004, the body of Brandi’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend was found in Whittaker’s home. The boy had taken a cocktail of drugs leading to his death. Later that year, Brandi went missing, and her body turned up dumped on a friend’s property. She had been taking drugs, but the cause of death wasn’t clear, and authorities filed no charges.

Unfortunately, Jack had problems with gambling, and his uninsured house burned to the ground. He died in 2020.

8 Sky High to Rock Bottom

We can’t know what would have happened if Edwards had won just enough money to turn his life around, but he won a lot.

David Lee Edwards was a connected armed robber who had spent one-third of his 46 years in prison. Broke and unemployed, he borrowed some cash from a friend to pay a utility bill. Unfortunately, Edwards had some change left over that he spent on a pizza and a couple of lottery tickets. He won $27 million.

At a press conference, Edwards swore that he would turn his life around and look after his daughter. Yet, he immediately began spending money left and right. His mansion in Florida was full of expensive gadgets, and his body was full of expensive drugs.

Edwards supported his and his wife’s increasing dependence on drugs. He also paid for his friend’s drugs and funerals if they overdosed. Edwards did spoil his daughter, but by 2006, he and his wife were living in a storage unit surrounded by drug paraphernalia and their own body waste.

Mrs. Edwards left him; he died penniless in a hospice in Kentucky. He was 58.

7 Madame Mayor

Maureen O’Connor, a native of San Diego, California, rose through the local political ranks to become the city’s first female mayor from 1986 to 1992. At the time, she was married to Robert O. Peterson—the founder of the Jack in the Box fast-food chain.

When her husband died in 1994, O’Connor’s personal fortune stood somewhere between $40 and $50 million. In the cutthroat world of politics, all successful politicians are big risk-takers. O’Connor was a political winner, but she was a loser when she began to gamble in casinos.

O’Connor lost around $13 million in casinos. She misappropriated over $2 million from her husband’s charitable foundation, which she immediately spent playing video poker. To raise more cash to fund her gambling, she liquidated all her savings and took out second and third mortgages on her home. She attempted to pay off her debts but found herself charged with wire fraud.

She attributed her gambling addiction to a brain tumor. In 2015, a judge formally dropped all charges against her.

6 To the Bitter End

John Werner Kluge (1914–2010) was a successful businessman who became a television mogul. At one time, he was the richest person in the United States. A hard-working philanthropist, he also found time to indulge in his hobby of getting married. He married four times, and Patricia was the third of his wives.

When the couple divorced in 1990, Patricia kept the Albemarle estate near Charlottesville, Virginia. The couple had built a 45-room mansion on the property that hosted parties for the rich and famous. With her new husband, Patricia Kluge opened the Kluge Estate Winery in 1999. This was an excellent place for growing vines, and their ambition was to create a world-renowned winery that would produce some of the finest vintages in the world. To an extent, they succeeded.

However, they had enough money to launch the project and were rich by most people’s standards, but their plans called for much more money than they had available. Patricia took out $65 million in loans but found that she was over-extended. When the economy crashed in 2008, she put the estate up for sale. Donald Trump eventually bought it for a fraction of the asking price. It is now known as the Trump Winery.

It is possible to be rich but not quite rich enough. This is the trap that Patricia fell into.

5 Transfer of Ownership

Atahualpa (1502–1533) was not rich because of his own efforts. He was rich because he was Atahualpa. What happened to his fabulous wealth was not his fault—he was a victim of history.

Atahualpa was the last supreme emperor of the Incas but was unfortunate enough to be in power as the Spanish rampaged through his lands. In Incan society, everything from the fruits of the trees to the gold from the mountains belonged to the emperor. Everything in these vast, rich lands belonged to him.

When the Spanish executed Atahualpa, all of his wealth belonged to them.

Broadly speaking, this massive transfer of wealth ruined the Spanish empire. The Dutch and the British, among others, built empires based on trade. The Spanish did not have to. This unearned wealth meant they tapped their conquests for more gold and silver; the Spanish exported this back to Spain. Many Spanish and Italian merchants got rich, but the economic consequences were dire. The unbalanced Spanish economy suffered from inflation, and massive estates split the countryside into haves and have-nots.

Although Spain was to remain powerful for a while, the seeds of its future failure were sprouting in beds of unearned wealth.

4 “Spend, Spend, Spend!”

Before online gambling, many people in Britain would wager small amounts on the results of soccer matches through a system called “football pools.” These listed the games to be played on the following Saturday, and you could win a lot of money if you could forecast eight score draws.

Viv Nicholson had grown up in poverty. She was pregnant at sixteen and had four children when her second husband, Keith, won the pools in 1961. The prize was over £152,000—over 3 million today.

When asked what they would do with their winnings, the couple famously answered, “Spend, spend, spend.” And they did.

They spent everything. Keith died in a car accident in 1965, and creditors declared Viv bankrupt. She later said that she had had no idea what to do with so much money and that her win had alienated her from her friends, family, and background.

3 Too Much of a Good Thing

Gerald Muswagon was not a well-educated man but was friendly and well-liked by his family and friends. Yet, he had had brushes with the law in his native Canada since 1981.

In 1998, he bought a two-dollar lottery ticket that won him $10 million. He spent a lot of it on luxuries and gifts but did try to invest in his own lumber business. Unfortunately, his business lost money because of low sales. Muswagon was surrounded by hangers-on who were only interested in his money and never got the guidance that he needed about how to handle such a large sum.

He continued to have problems with the police, and things got worse when his wife died suddenly in 2002. Muswagon hanged himself in his parent’s garage.

2 Millions to Manslaughter

Ibi Roncaioli was Hungarian by birth but moved to Canada, where she married a successful gynecologist. She was not short of money but bought a ticket for a lotto game with a friend. In 1991, the two won $10 million and split the money.

Roncaioli started spending her winnings without telling her husband, but she didn’t spend much of it on herself. Mainly, the money went to her three sons. One of these was the son that she had had with her husband, one from before she married, and the third was a child that even her husband of thirty years knew nothing about.

Most people who knew the Roncaiolis described them as a happy, devoted older couple. However, in 2003, Ibi died. The authorities assumed that she had died from natural causes. Still, after careful examination, they found a toxic level of painkillers and alcohol in her body, and there were needle marks on her legs and feet.

The court found her husband guilty of manslaughter. The couple’s net worth was just $300,000 despite Ibi’s winnings and her husband’s considerable earnings. Her 72-year-old husband was sentenced to seven years.

1 The King

Elvis Presley made a lot of money during his stellar career. However, he had no idea how to handle it. He spent a fortune on a luxurious lifestyle and treating his friends. For example, he would pay to have hotel rooms redecorated to look like a room in his mansion, Graceland—he didn’t want to get homesick.

At the time of his death in 1977, Presley was almost broke. And his money had never made him happy.

His ex-wife, Priscilla, eventually took charge of Elvis’s estate after his death because Lisa Marie, their daughter, was still a minor. If Elvis had no head for business, Priscilla did. She converted what little was left into a $100 million business.

Your brain is an amazing organ. It generates enough electricity to power a lightbulb. It’s believed to operate at one exaFLOP, which is said to be of a scale of “a billion billion calculations per second.” It may have a storage capacity in the range of one petabyte, or 500 billion printed pages of standard text.  And as amazing as that all seems, there’s still a stunning number of things it can’t do that you may not even realize. 

10. Your Brain Doesn’t Sense Wetness

Imagine you’re outside taking a walk. It’s a warm day and slightly cloudy. You feel something cold and wet hit you in the face and you realize it has started to rain. What exactly did you feel? The nerves in your flesh will have registered the pressure of the drop and the change in temperature. But what about the wetness?

Despite what our senses tell us, our brain does not have the ability to sense wetness. What we perceive as wetness is a combination of sensations that includes texture, pressure, temperature, and so on. When they happen together, our brain is able to identify them as wetness because, in our experience, that is what wetness feels like. It is an illusion based on our prior experience. But no doubt you have had experiences in which you felt something you thought was wet and it turned out not to be, like a trick of the senses. It’s all just your brain trying to process sensations. 

As it happens, our brain is not good at processing that feeling of wetness differently from one spot on the body to another but you can at least rate what you perceive as a level of wetness. 

9. You Don’t Perceive Black in the Absence of Light

When you need to draw a picture of what you see when you close your eyes, you’re going to use the color black. That’s not necessarily what you actually see, however. The color you view is a shade of very dark gray. The Germans have a name for it – eigengrau. It means “own gray” or “intrinsic gray.”

There are a couple of things at play that cause us to never truly see blackness with our eyes closed and they deal with contrast. You need light to understand darkness. Devoid of that, you settle on something less dark, that intrinsic gray that plays out behind your eyelids. Also, there’s brain chemistry afoot. 

A protein called rhodopsin helps convert light signals to electrical ones in that brain. This is what allows your brain to make sense of what you see. The protein is activated by photons. Photons cause the rhodopsin to experience isomerization and that begins the process of “sight” as we understand it. But in the absence of light, spontaneous isomerization also occurs, allowing us to see, in a very limited way, when there is no light at all. And that produces intrinsic gray. 

8. Your Brain Has the Ability to Detect Magnetic Fields

The mystery of how birds know how to migrate sometimes thousands of miles every year can be chalked up to their remarkable ability to follow the magnetic fields of the Earth. Other animals, ranging from sharks to flies, also have the ability to sense magnetic fields. The ability to do this is related to proteins called cryptochromes.

The weird thing about cryptochromes is that humans have them, too. Studies show they are active in some people’s brains and when they are exposed to changes in magnetic fields, those proteins react just like they would in an animal that might use them to navigate. So the human brain can theoretically sense changes in magnetic fields. But the problem is your brain has no idea what to do with that information. 

Though research indicates that your brain can do it, it doesn’t do anything with it. There’s no discernible effect on behavior, either consciously or unconsciously, that we can determine. 

7. When Drunk Your Brain Can’t Form New Memories

Many people enjoy a drink of alcohol now and then, and some people enjoy more than their fair share. This can become a problem if you drink so much that you can’t even remember what you did the night before. Drinking until you forget everything is generally considered bad. But it might not be what’s happening when you drink, at least not technically.

Drinking doesn’t make you forget so much as it doesn’t allow you to remember. What’s the difference? Forgetting implies you had the memory in the first place. But alcohol impairs your brain’s ability to form new memories. If you drink a significant amount, you can reach the state of being blackout drunk, which means you did whatever you did when you were drunk, but your brain had no way of saving those memories. So you didn’t do something and forget it, you just never made a memory in the first place. 

When your blood alcohol hits 0.18 to 0.30, your hippocampus becomes impaired. This is significantly higher than what is generally considered the legal blood alcohol limit if the police pull you over, and is getting close to alcohol poisoning. 

6. Your Brain Can’t Relax in Unfamiliar Places

If you’ve ever found yourself in a hotel room or even at a friend’s house and sleep was as elusive as the mighty sasquatch, you’re not alone. Sleeping in unfamiliar places is not easy for most people and it’s all your brain’s fault. Or half of your brain, anyway.

Blame it on our ancient ancestors who had to worry about predators and maybe attacks from rival clans, but when we try to sleep in unfamiliar settings, our brains are less inclined to relax. The right side of your brain will have a better time shutting down and getting to sleep, but the left side seems to stay alert. The same behavior can be seen in animals like dolphins that literally can’t fully go to sleep because they’ll drown. You may not drown at a Motel 6 but your brain isn’t sure, so it needs to stay on guard.

The phenomenon happens so frequently it has its own name – First Night Effect. It leads to your brain reacting more readily to noises in the night and waking you up faster if something happens. But it usually only happens for one night. Brain imaging techniques used to monitor how it works also show that, upon sleeping in that same place for a second night, many brains will chill out and both sides are able to shut down and get rest at the same time. However, some people take up to four days to finally relax in a new place.

5. Your Brain Reacts the Same to Physical Pain and Emotional Pain 

One of the worst feelings in the world is having your heart broken. But have you ever burned your hand on the stove? That hurts, too. Could you reasonably say which one hurts more? Or, even harder, can you tell how they hurt differently? If you’re finding it harder to tell the difference between your understanding of physical pain and emotional pain, don’t worry. Your brain doesn’t know the difference either. 

It’s not just a flowery metaphor to say heartache hurts like real, physical pain. Research using an MRI has shown that a human brain reacts the same to emotional pain as it does to physical pain. That means, in a physiological sense, you hurt the same and your brain doesn’t draw any distinction between those two pains. Even worse, emotional pain actually makes you dumber. You take an immediate hit to your reasoning skills when dealing with heartache, and your IQ may drop around 25%.

4. Your Brain Can’t Map Altitude 

If you’ve ever been in an airplane, you know that, at some point, the captain typically comes on the intercom to let you know your cruising altitude. You may never have thought about it before,but next time you’re up there, so if you can guess your altitude before you’re told. Chances are you can’t because our brains are very bad at mapping altitude. 

Research into the brains of rats as they climbed up indicated that the part of their brains responsible for mapping space and distance barely register at all when the animal is just moving upward. The cells that measure distance just don’t know how far up an animal goes when it’s climbing because our brains seem to understand how things work in three dimensions, in particular being able to go up vertically, differently than it understands working on the ground. It’s a bit like having two different maps by which to navigate. Your brain is pretty good at reading the horizontal one, not so much the vertical one. 

3. Your Brain Can’t Function Well on Social Media

Did you find the link to this on social media? We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, you’re being entertained and educated at the same time. Isn’t that great? The bad news is that social media is ruining your brain.

According to research, the average person puts themselves through over two and a half hours of social media every day. This is changing how your brain processes information and makes you fall victim to something called variable-ratio reinforcement, where you constantly expect to see new information and feel rewarded when you do. This makes it hard to focus on any one thing for long periods of time and makes you easily distracted. 

Those who are heavy social media users perform more poorly on cognitive tests. It takes actual effort for them to focus on single tasks. Worse, your brain reacts to social media much the same as it does to drugs. You crave it and it can become an addiction. 

2. Your Brain Can’t Surprise Itself 

No doubt you’ve heard you can’t tickle yourself. If you haven’t heard of it, give it a try right now. For most of us, it’s a nonstarter. You just can’t do it, even if someone else tickling you leaves you in a writhing, laughing mess on the floor. But it’s not necessarily because your brain is a buzzkill.

To start with, ticklishness is actually a defense mechanism. The sensation and our visceral, twitchy, squirmy reaction is born from our reaction to things like spiders or other weird little critters crawling over us. By the same token, it’s potentially a response to aggression. Our ancestors may have laughed even when uncomfortable to show they had no interest in fighting. But we can’t do it to ourselves because our brain sees us coming, so to speak.

Surprise is key to tickling working. If a person is tickling you, you don’t know where their fingers will go next. The entire experience is uncomfortable, and the laughter is generally not really that joyful. But your cerebellum knows where your hands are going for a self tickle, so the sensation of surprise can’t take root. 

1. Your Brain Can’t Multitask

Some people pride themselves on their ability to multitask. If you’ve been in the job market at all for the past 30 years or so, you’ve probably seen how most job ads say they want employees who can multitask. It’s how we get things done these days. Except that it isn’t. This may come as a shock to you, especially if you think you’re a good multitasker, but neuroscience says you’re not. The human brain is not good at multitasking.

No one is discounting the sense of accomplishment you might feel when you get three jobs done in quick succession, but the fact is you’d do better handling each task individually. And honestly, when you think you’re multitasking, are you? Neuroscientists say most of us are task switching. You’re not doing two things at once, you’re switching quickly between two things. The reason is that your brain is not wired to focus on more than one thing at a time. 

For an example, neuroscientists suggest trying to write an email while talking on the phone. You may think you can do that, but try it for real. Pay attention to whether or not you can speak in full, coherent sentences, listen to the other person, and type a readable email at the same time. In reality, most of us would talk, then type, then talk. Your brain can’t split up those two communications tasks at the same time. In fact, the more tasks you try to accomplish at the same time, even with task switching, the worse you’ll perform overall.