Photography has come a long way. At times, it’s hard to believe that black-and-white photographs were the only type available some decades ago. Nowadays, we have so many options. And let’s not even talk about current photography fads like the selfie.

But we do not have a monopoly on photography fads. In fact, the people who lived when the camera was invented seem to have had better—and weirder—photography fads than we do.

10 Postmortem Photography

Postmortem photography was a bizarre genre that involved live people taking pictures with the body of a dead relative. It was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Photographs were expensive at the time, and most people didn’t take pictures throughout their lives. The only opportunity was after their deaths. In fact, it was often the only picture of the deceased person.

Postmortem photography was possible because most people died at home. Most pictures were of children because infant mortality was high at the time. The children were dressed up—sometimes surrounded by flowers and toys—before the picture was taken. Their mothers even carried the kids sometimes. The pictures often looked as if the dead children were just napping.

Older children and adults were propped up with belts, pulleys, and levers. Some even stood as if they were alive. The eyes were often dead giveaways, and photographers sometimes added glass eyes to make it seem like the dead person was looking at the camera.

Considering that transportation was unreliable and dead people became stiff after a few hours (called rigor mortis), relatives often sent for the photographer before the person died. The photographers sometimes arrived after rigor mortis had set in. But that was usually not a problem because they were experts at manipulating stiff corpses.

Postmortem photography slowly disappeared as advances in medicine made people live longer. More people also died in hospitals instead of their homes. Cameras and photographs also got cheaper over time, and most people had other pictures of themselves and their relatives.^[1]

9 Hidden Mother Photography

Early photography had long exposure times. The subject needed to remain still for 30 seconds before a picture could be taken. It is difficult to have an adult sit still and stare at a camera for 30 seconds. It is almost impossible to have a child in such a position.^[2]

This was why mothers sometimes hid in the background while holding their children in place. This was called hidden mother photography. Most mothers covered themselves with clothes to blend in with the background. Others were disguised as chairs, backdrops, curtains, or whatever would hide them from appearing in the photograph.

8 Spirit Photography

Spirit photography was another genre inspired by the long exposure times of early cameras. Subjects of early photographs were required to remain still to prevent ghosting. As you probably guessed from the name, ghosting means the subject appeared faint and transparent—as if they were a ghost.

In 1861, photographer William H. Mumler discovered a method of creating consistent ghosts in his photographs. It is believed that Mumler created his ghost pictures by inserting the glass plate of a previous photograph of the supposed ghost in front of a fresh glass plate he was using for his latest subject.

Instead of creating a unique genre of photography, Mumler used his knowledge to defraud his clients. He claimed that he could take real photographs of ghosts and soon had clients swarming to his shop to take pictures with ghosts of their late relatives. His clients included Mary Todd Lincoln, who took a picture with the ghost of her late husband, Abraham Lincoln.

People soon exposed Mumler’s ghost pictures as fake. There were claims that he raided the homes of his clients to steal pictures of their late relatives to use for his ghost glass plates. This was probably true because the ghost was sometimes a living relative. This effectively shattered Mumler’s photography career even though a court acquitted him of all charges.^[3]

7 Smileless Photographs

People rarely smiled in early photos, especially in pictures taken during the 19th and early 20th centuries. There were several reasons for this. Early photography was considered an extension of painting, and paintings were supposed to look natural. This means that smiling and anything other than a flat facial expression was not allowed.

There was also postmortem photography. As we already mentioned, pictures taken during postmortem sessions were often the only picture a family had of their late relative. The pictures were intended to immortalize a dead person—and a natural look was the most favored facial expression.

Another reason was the long exposure times of early cameras. As we already mentioned, subjects were required to remain still. This meant that they were required to maintain a single facial expression to avoid ending up with a blurry mouth. Most subjects opted to have a face with a flat facial expression because it was the easiest to maintain.

Another reason was the fact that Victorians did not smile. There was the widespread belief that only idiots smiled. Nobody wanted to be considered an idiot because they smiled in a photo.^[4]

6 Headless Portraits

Early photographers manipulated pictures a whole century before computers and image editing software came along. Image manipulation started right after the invention of the first cameras when some photographers discovered a method of cutting and pasting two pictures together to create a new one.

Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander used this technique to create the headless portrait genre in the 19th century. As you may have guessed from the name, one or several subjects in a headless portrait appeared without heads. The subject or somebody else in the picture held the head in their hands or on a plate.

The headless person or the other subject sometimes held a bloodied knife to make it seem like they had cut off the head. While this type of portrait can be easily created with the photo editing software available today, it was a chore to make in earlier times and was not as easy as it looks.^[5]

5 Builder’s Photo

Locomotive and car manufacturers used the builder’s photo (aka official photo) to showcase their new or upgraded products. The shot either covered the front and side of the product or just the side. The locomotives were often without carriages, and the images were sometimes edited to remove the backgrounds.

Some manufacturers painted their locomotives gray so that they would look good in the black-and-white photographs. Darker areas of the locomotive were also painted in bright colors to make them appear brighter. The locomotives were repainted in their real colors after the photograph was taken.

Railroad companies hung the pictures in their offices and used them on postcards and in advertisements. Locomotive enthusiasts also got caught up in the fad. However, their pictures were called roster shots.^[6]

4 Pigeon Photography

In 1907, Dr. Julius Neubronner filed a patent for the pigeon camera. As the name already hints, the camera was strapped to a pigeon. A timer allowed it to automatically take pictures when the pigeon was in flight.

The camera was a win for aerial photography at the time. In fact, its pictures are among the earliest aerial images ever taken. Before the pigeon camera, people took aerial photos with cameras attached to balloons and kites. However, kites and balloons were slower and could only travel limited distances.

This becomes more interesting when we realize that Dr. Neubronner never started off to create a camera for aerial photography. He invented the camera to document the routes flown by the pigeons.

This is not to say that the pigeon camera did not have its flaws. While useful for aerial photography, it was unreliable for surveillance because it shot images at random. This was why it lost its place to airplanes when World War I came along.^[7]

3 Manual Retouching

People started searching for ways to look better in pictures right after the invention of photography. But there were no computers or photo editing software during the Victorian era. The Victorians solved this problem with pencils to manually retouch the glass plates used to create the photos.

Sharp pencils were used to make body lines bolder. Blunt pencils were used to make darker areas of the body appear brighter. The cheeks were often shaded because they usually appeared darker in the finished image. Photo editing was so common during the Victorian era that almost every picture was manually retouched.^[8]

2 Hand-Colored Photographs

Some 19th- and early 20th-century pictures appear in color even though colored photography was only perfected in the mid-20th century. How was this possible? By painting over pictures, of course.

Johann Baptist Isenring started the hand-colored photograph fad when he painted over a black-and-white photo with pigment and gum Arabic. Several other photographers soon joined the fad. A popular photographer was Yokohama Matsusaburo, who doubled as a painter and lithographer.

Matsusaburo created his first colored photograph in the 1860s and was renowned for his hand-colored pictures. Hand-colored photography reached its height at the beginning of the 20th century but died a swift death when stable color films and color prints became available in the 1950s.^[9]

1 Red Shirt School Of Photography

The “Red Shirt School of Photography” was a genre that appeared after the perfection of colored photography. The genre was unwittingly started by several magazines, which were all accused of deliberately adding red items in their pictures.

Rumors say that photographers working for the magazines traveled with red shirts, red umbrellas, and any other red items they could lay their hands on. They added these items to their photographs to make them look appealing. National Geographic was one of the magazines accused of starting the fad.

Colored pictures fascinated people when color cameras became mainstream in the 1950s. Editors soon realized that readers focused on the colors in the picture instead of the lines and movements that were the focal points during the era of black-and-white photos. So the editors concentrated on attracting more readers by using appealing images.

In fact, editors selected the pictures based on color. This was why photographers preferred taking pictures that included sharp and appealing colors like red. Some photographers traveled with actors wearing bright clothing or using bright accessories and made them walk into a scene just before taking the picture. The genre died in the 1960s.^[10]

Let’s start this one with an acknowledgement that a characteristic of a lot of fads is that they rarely make sense. Fidget spinners, for instance, were just things that spun. They were huge for about a month and then they weren’t. The Pet Rock was another one. It was legitimately a stone, and you kept it in the house. 

That aside, there are fads and there are fads. You can see how a fidget spinner might be something useful for a fidgety person. And a pet rock has some quirky kitsch value. But there are some other fads that really stretch your imagination to explain why they ever existed.

10. Walking With a Limp 

We’ve all seen someone who seems to be faking or forcing the way they walk before. Usually it’s someone who has a weirdly dramatic swagger they’ve decided to add to their gait. For reference, look at any clip of LaVar Ball walking into a room. One thing most people don’t do, unless they’re panning for sympathy, is fake a limp. But that wasn’t always the case.

In Victorian England, limps were all the rage. Known as the Alexandra Limp, fashionable ladies of the time adopted this wobbly stride in honor of Alexandra of Denmark who had married the Prince of Wales. She was already a fashion trendsetter and the ladies of Great Britain who wanted to seem current and cool would copy her looks. 

When Alexandra developed rheumatic fever, the illness left her with a noticeable limp. So, naturally, those desperate to emulate her also walked with a limp. Shopkeepers even began selling uneven shoes, one with a much higher heel, to accommodate the fad.

Like any proper fad, most people hated it. One newspaper described it as idiotic and ludicrous. That it was inspired by an actual physical infirmity was the source of most people’s dislike but it only lasted a short while. 

9. Flagpole Sitting

The band Harvey Danger was a one-hit wonder with their song Flagpole Sitta but maybe they would have done better if they’d released the song back in the 1920s when flagpole sitting was actually a thing. 

There are no euphemisms at play here, flagpole sitting was the act of sitting on a flagpole. You’d climb to the top of a pole, the higher and more dramatically placed the better, and sit there. The longer you could endure, the more attention you’d get. Hollywood studios hired a professional stuntman named Alvin Kelly to do it in 1924 to get attention for a movie that arguably had nothing to do with flagpoles.

Kelly stayed on the pole for 13 hours and got in the news, which got him more offers to sit on flagpoles, which inspired other people all around the country to try it. 

By 1927, Kelly had graduated to mind blowing flagpole sitting endurance heights and stayed atop one pole for over 23 days. They sent up a pail on a rope for food and water, and he had a tube he used to go to the bathroom.

8. Swallowing Live Goldfish 

There are a lot of fads around eating that are still popular today. Spicy food challenges are still huge, as are competitive eating competitions. But one that thankfully got left behind in the 1930s was the act of swallowing live goldfish. 

According to legend, the fad began in 1939 at Harvard. A freshman bragged to some friends he’d once eaten a live fish, as freshmen do. Being a hallowed institution of higher education, his friends immediately bet him $10 he couldn’t repeat this miraculous and scholarly act.

This all would have died there, along with the poor fish, if not for a reporter also being there for God knows what reasons. So the student ate the fish, made his $10, and the reporter wrote a story about it which went national. 

Like the Cinnamon Challenge that spread on the internet, the goldfish challenge spread as well. By the end of April the record for swallowing live fish was at 101. Eventually, amidst warnings of parasites, threats of lawsuits and animal cruelty allegations, the fad eventually died like so many fish before it.  

7. Phone Booth Stuffing

Finding a phone booth in the wild these days is kind of like seeing a dolphin when you go boating. It’s very fun and exciting because it’s a novelty that makes you feel connected to a secret world which, in the phone booth’s case, is the past. 

Once upon a time there were phone booths all over the world, just waiting on street corners for those who needed to call a cab or change into a superhero. They even had doors. In the 1950s, they were also used for clown car-esque endurance tests. Just how many people can fit into a single phone booth?

For most of us the answer to that question is one. They were built to hold a single person. But there’s a story of how 25 South African students jammed themselves into a single phone booth in 1959 that set off the fad. They sent the pic of themselves to Guinness and achieved a world record. 

For those who doubt, the photos still exist that prove you can fit an impressive number of full grown adults in a phone booth if no one cares about comfort or breathing deeply. Colleges all around the world tried to match the feat, usually crapping out in the high teens.

The US record seems to be 22 students and by the end of 1959, few people were trying anymore so the South Africans went undefeated. 

6. Fake Moles and Beauty Marks

Beauty, it’s been said, is in the eye of the beholder. Throughout history, standards of beauty have changed greatly from place to place. But regardless of what a society values, you can rest assured there will be people trying to fake it in one way or another.

Once upon a time beauty marks were all the rage and a beauty mark, of course, is a mole. Back in Ancient Greece, a beauty mark on your cheek meant you were destined for prosperity, so people definitely wanted them. Later on, fake beauty marks made of things like velvet or even mouse fur became fashionable. 

Women in England would use them to cover blemishes like scars, which is where the idea of them adding to your beauty came from, since they covered up things that were not beautiful. By the 16th century they were no longer just cover-ups but attention getters. They would contrast with an artificially pale complexion to draw the eye of others.

5. Raccoon Coats 

Fur coats are no longer fashionable among most people thanks to most people appreciating you’re killing multiple animals for no reason except to make a coat. There’s still a market for them, but they carry a stigma. 

Once upon a time not only was fur considered fine, there was even a full length raccoon fur coat fad. In the 1920s, it was a fashion trend among college men to deck themselves out in a full length coat.

The trend was mostly in Ivy League schools because, even back then, you were paying some cash for a fur coat. Eventually the idea of men in fur coats became undesirable and by the 70s it was mostly associated with men of unsavory characters who might be pimps. 

4. Post Mortem Photography 

Few fads ever achieved the creepy heights (or depths) of post mortem photography. If a loved one had died, you could hire a photographer to come and take a picture of the body. Except it wasn’t just doing that. You’d pose the body in your home or outside or wherever in a way that suggested they were still alive. 

Infant mortality was high in the 1800s, and photography was rare. A couple would have many children and it was likely a few of them wouldn’t make it but, you know, you could always take a family photo after the fact and make it look like they were still there if you missed the chance when they were still alive. Some photos depict all the kids posing together, with one of them propped up against a wall because they were no longer living. 

When you think about it, it makes a grim kind of sense. It would be the last time you’d ever get a chance to take a photo of that person. That could account for why, in the 1840s, photographers took three times as many death photos as wedding photos. 

3. Pointy Shoes

You may have noticed in some medieval art that people, often jesters and bards and such, are wearing impossibly pointy shoes. This was not just an artistic choice from whoever made that art, it was a reflection of a fad of the times. Pointy shoes were really cool once. 

Pointy shoes, called crackows because they were blamed on Poland, rose to prominence in England in the 1380s. Men and women wore them and the more aristocratic you were, the longest your toes had to be. They’d stuff them with junk like moss and hair so they wouldn’t get floppy. 

In France, the country was already sick of them before the English even caught on. Charles V banned them in Paris in 1368. It wasn’t until 1463 in England when King Edward IV banned anyone who wasn’t nobility from having shoes with a point longer than two inches. 

The point of the pointy shoe was to show off. A longer shoe was more expensive, so it naturally meant you had more wealth. But it also symbolized the fact you were kind of lazy. Laborers wouldn’t wear silly, long shoes, only the aristocracy could. So it symbolized how you didn’t need to do manual labor because you literally couldn’t. Not in those shoes, anyway. 

Like so many things that have become popular in the years since, pointy shoes were a way of smugly telling the world you had money to burn. 

2. Panty Raids

If you recall the movie Revenge of the Nerds, you may remember one scene where the nerd fraternity engages in a panty raid. They break into a sorority house to steal underwear from the women there. In modern times that’s just short of mind-boggling and, let’s be honest, it was a little unrealistic even back in the ’80s. But the writers didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. The panty raid was a real fad back in the ’50s and ’60s.

In 1952, the National Guard had to be called to the University of Missouri to deal with 2,000 male students who went on a panty raid rampage. They kicked in doors and broke windows at sororities and dorms and stormed the halls. Some of the women tried to fight them off with broom handles and buckets of water. Underwear was stolen but so was money, jewelry and more.

Try to imagine being in your dorm as 2,000 dudes break into every possible opening in the building and tear your entire room apart. What was a fad in the ’50s is essentially the kickoff to a new Blumhouse horror franchise today. Back then, the governor of Missouri literally said “boys will be boys.”

1. Dead Fish Hats for Whales

Fads may seem like one of the silliest ways a human being can waste their time but if you think that, you need to know it’s not true. The human being part, at least. We didn’t corner the market on this idea and there is some documented evidence of orca whales engaging in the most amazing fad you’ll ever hear of. They used to wear dead fish hats.

Whales are often studied by scientists, and a lot of that study is simple observation. Track them, watch what they do, see if we can learn about how they live and communicate and all that good stuff. Back in 1987, a pod of orca whales was being observed by researchers when one of the whales began wearing a salmon on her head. The salmon was dead, and she just held it there above her snout like a little fish hat. 

The whale continued to wear her fish hat and, over the course of the next several weeks, other whales joined in. Whales in her pod started it first and then it spread to two other pods that the first pod had made contact with. Everyone was swimming around with a fish hat. 

Like a human fad, the novelty seemed to wear off for the whales and by the end of the six week period; it was done. No more fish hats. There’s never been a solid explanation for why it happened, at least not any more revelatory than they just felt like it.

Health fads are nothing new, but they are much older than many people think. The ancient Egyptians, for example, practiced strange methods of losing weight and treating illness, much like people did in the 20th century. Whatever the era, people tried whatever was at hand to achieve perfection . . . even if the methods were a bit on the crazy side.

Throughout the years, people have done some crazy things to fix their bodies, and only science and the benefit of hindsight have proven them as dangerous as they really were. Whether someone was trying to lose weight or get rid of a pesky STD, humans have been at this health craze thing for a long time. Here are ten of the craziest things people have done to fix themselves.

10 Mercury To Treat Syphilis

As just about anyone in the world knows, mercury is highly toxic and should never be ingested. We are warned against high levels of mercury in fish, and people are generally wary of the substance. It wasn’t always like that, though, and for centuries, mercury was the go-to treatment to cure syphilis. If you know anything about that disease, it’s not surprising that people would try anything to cure it. Syphilis is a debilitating and horrific ailment that will disfigure and kill a person if left untreated. These days, we use penicillin, but back in the 1300s, quicksilver was on hand to help anyone suffering from the STD.

It was rubbed on the skin, injected, or taken orally, and while it remained a popular treatment until the mid-20th century, it never worked. If anything, it helped to kill the patient faster, which probably alleviated some of the pain associated with the illness, but that’s like cutting off the head to cure the headache. Eventually, it was proven that a compound of mercurous chloride (calomel) did help in treating the disease, but this wasn’t until 1910, and it was still fairly toxic.^[1]

9 Lobotomies To Treat Mental Illness

Mental health problems are an area of medicine that has only recently been studied and treated as an illness. As recently as the mid-20th century, we were still locking people up in institutions to “treat” their mental disorders, but this was often just a means of taking people out of society. They would be heavily medicated and receive little to no treatment, and many were tortured with barbaric forms of medicine, including electroshock therapy. Another option for those suffering from serious mental health disorders was something called the “ice pick lobotomy.”

Lobotomies became popular in the United States back in 1936, and by 1949, up to 5,000 of the operations were performed annually on patients as young as four years old. The procedure involves stabbing long metal probes through the eye socket under local anesthesia so that the brain can be literally scrambled by sweeping through the frontal lobe.^[2] The damage caused personality changes and effectively killed the patient, though their bodies remained alive. The practice was popular, but by the 1970s, it had become highly criticized and was mostly phased out. Its brutality resulted in long-term brain damage to tens of thousands of patients who could have been treated by other, less invasive means.

8 Arsenic Consumption For Weight Loss

Arsenic is one of those things most people associate with rat poison, but for a time, people happily consumed it in the form of a diet pill. Back in the 1800s, people in Austria began ingesting arsenic in their coffee as a weight loss method. They would put small amounts in their morning cup of Joe and increase it over a period of a few weeks until diarrhea set in. Once their poo began to run, they would slowly decrease the dosage and enjoy the benefits of not being able to keep anything solid in their bodies.^[3] Sure, they would lose weight, but they were also poisoning themselves.

The fad spread into pill form and was marketed as a weight loss diet miracle around the world well into the 1920s, but it probably killed people more than anything else. We now know that arsenic doesn’t just make you feel lousy and have to run to the bathroom; it causes your cells to die. It also increases a person’s risk of cancer even in small doses, so it should be avoided at all times.

7 The Last Chance Diet

There are a lot of ridiculous fad diets out there, including the Cookie Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, and many others, but few have been as deadly as the aptly named “Last Chance Diet.” Back in 1976, Dr. Robert Linn marketed what he called the Last Chance Diet by insisting that the only way to stay thin and remain healthy was to eat nothing and consume only his magic tonic, Prolinn. The problem with the diet was that it required no exercise, and Prolinn consisted of fewer than 400 calories of energy, which is far too low for any adult.^[4]

Prolinn was composed primarily of collagen, which was essentially nothing more than ground-up hooves and the hides of animals killed at a slaughterhouse. The drink was little more than the leavings of animal waste nobody else wanted, but once it was turned into a beverage, Dr. Linn turned it into liquid gold . . . and killed an estimated 30 people. Linn was investigated by the FDA, and his diet is one that absolutely nobody should try.

6 Tapeworms For Weight Loss

If there’s one thing everyone should know not to do, it’s purposefully ingest a parasite like a tapeworm. Even though common sense dictates that this a bad idea, people have been doing it since Victorian times. The idea is simple: Ingest a capsule containing a tapeworm egg, and once the egg hatches and the worm fully forms, it will feed off the food a person consumes. This enables them to eat whatever they want, and it won’t gain them any weight because the worm will be pulling in all those horrible calories for them. The reality isn’t as neat and tidy, as tapeworms can lead to a plethora of problems for the infected, and they must be removed.

Not only was this diet popular in Victorian England, but it persists to this day. People are still purposefully infecting themselves with tapeworms so that they can lose weight. Fortunately, worms are relatively easy to remove these days, but back in the 19th century, it required a number of dangerous methods. These included swallowing a large metal cylinder (which often choked the patient) to purposefully poisoning oneself to get rid of the worm. Many people died as a result of simply trying to remove the worm, and despite what you may read online, there is never a reason to purposefully infect yourself with a tapeworm!^[5]

5 LSD To Treat Alcoholism

Alcoholism is one of the most serious diseases, afflicting millions of people every day, so it’s no surprise people turn to unconventional methods to treat it. For a lot of people who either don’t want to or are unable to attend a meeting type of treatment, there is LSD . . . potentially. Back in the 1960s, research was conducted to determine whether or not dropping acid could curb a person’s desire for alcohol. When it was undertaken, the study had mixed results and was abandoned, until recently. Back in 2012, researchers dove back into the collected data and began studying the effects of hallucinogenic medications on treating alcoholism.^[6]

The study found it to be effective in 59 percent of participants, so it may not be the most far-fetched treatment option on this list. Granted, the Food and Drug Administration isn’t likely to approve the treatment anytime soon, but there is an alternative on the market called naltrexone, which provided similar results. The dangers of LSD treatment come with the potential side effect of psychedelics that most people are aware of: a bad trip. Improper use of LSD and other drugs like it can lead to complications for people with mental illness and other significant health issues.

4 Tobacco Enema (And Other Crazy Stuff People Have Shoved Up Their Butts)

If you’ve ever told someone to go blow smoke up their ass, there’s a chance they could have taken you seriously. The idiom comes from the actual 18th-century practice of blowing smoke up someone’s rectum in the form of a tobacco enema. The practice was developed into a common medical procedure used well into the late 1700s. The main use of the tobacco enema was to treat drowning victims. It was thought that the smoke would encourage a person’s respiratory system to kick into gear while the smoke literally helped to dry the person out. It worked about as often as you might think.^[7]

Blowing smoke up there isn’t the only strange enema treatment folks have used over the years. In addition to tobacco smoke, people have regularly gotten coffee enemas. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Another strange enema people seem to enjoy is the oil enema used to treat constipation. The most dangerous enema people have tried would have to be the alcohol enema, otherwise known as “butt-chugging.” This one is particularly dangerous, as anything you shove up your butt will be quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. This can be deadly, seeing as the alcohol doesn’t have the chance to filter through your liver.

3 Bloodletting

Bloodletting is one of those practices that was common for so long, it’s surprising we survived as a species. Thanks to the benefit of hindsight, we now know the worst thing you could do when sick is to drain your body of blood, but for centuries, that’s exactly what “doctors” did to their patients. The practice revolved around the concept that blood could become corrupted and needed to be removed from the body in order to allow it to heal. It may sound ridiculous to a 21st-century individual, but it made a lot of sense for a span of some 2,000 years.^[8]

Interestingly, bloodletting may have been beneficial in some instances. When used to treat hypertension, it makes sense that removing some of the blood would alleviate the symptoms of high blood pressure. In pretty much every other instance, it would weaken and potentially kill a patient through infection. This was especially true in the years before we discovered antibiotics. Infections would arise from the source of the wound, and few would properly recover.

2 Heroin Cough Syrup

There was once a time when you could go down to your local pharmacy and grab a dose of cough syrup laced with heroin. Sadly, those days are long behind us, but they do paint a picture of how different medical treatments were back in the 19th and early 20th centuries as compared to today. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer promoted a cure for coughing and colds in children back in the late 1890s via a combination of aspirin and heroin. This practice continued until 1912, when years of accumulated data suggested that patients were building up a “tolerance” for heroin, resulting in an increased number of addicts.^[9]

You might think it was taken off US shelves at the time, but it continued to be sold in stores until 1914, when it was made available by prescription only. Patients could continue to get it with a doctor’s prescription until 1924, when the FDA put the ban hammer down on the drug. Similarly, cocaine was used as an anesthetic and was famously an ingredient in Coca-Cola for a short time in the 19th century.

1 Radium For Everything

When Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium, it was one of the biggest finds in the 19th century. Marie later died of asplastic anemia thanks to her lifetime of exposure to the element, but long before her death, radium was considered a miracle substance that companies simply had to include in all of their products. Ironically, it was believed that radium had miraculous health-benefiting properties. Before the effects of radiation on human cells were fully understood, companies put radium in products including toothpaste, chocolate, and water, all meant for consumption. This continued well into the 1930s.

Other uses for radium included placing it in toys and night-lights, thanks to its luminous properties. The substance emits a faint glow, which was used to illuminate dark rooms without electricity. It was also placed into cosmetics that people smeared all over their faces, in heating pads, and in suppositories. Radium was even employed to treat impotence, which it likely only worsened. Radium remained a part of everyday life for years and wasn’t removed from all products until the 1960s, so be careful what you purchase at an antique shop. You never know what might contain radioactive material.^[10]