Word of the Day Challenge: DRINK

During the Victorian Era, when Consumption or Tuberculosis had infect 70-90% of the Urban populations of North America and  Europe and it  had killed 80% of those infected with the ” White Death ”  a morbid  fashion trend began to take place.

By morbid fashion trend,  I don’t mean the  kind of trend where French women and men wore red ribbons tied around their necks, resembling chokers, to stand in silent solidarity for those who had lost  their heads to the guillotine.

I mean that there was a trend to look like somebody who had been infected and was in all likelihood going to die from Tuberculosis

“The Common Lot,” lithograph by J. Bouvier. Wellcome Collection

To achieve this new standard of beauty- pale skin, dilated pupils, red cheeks and red lips and most important of all a skeletal frame ( yeah, anime and avatars on FB have adopted these looks ) it became necessary to ingest and bath in poison- to paint a picture, the same things that were being used to kill rodents were now ‘beauty aides’.

People drank and bathed in arsenic to achieve that  pale ‘ one foot and most of your body in the grave look ‘.  They created eyedrops out of nightshade in order to dilate their pupils. They even created face masks made out of lettuce leaves and dusted with Opium that they washed off  their faces with a splash of water mixed with a  enough arsenic to choke a horse ( I’m guessing )  in the morning.

A sickly young woman sits covered up on a balcony; death (a ghostly skeleton clutching a scythe and an hourglass) is standing next to her; representing tuberculosis. Watercolour by R. Cooper, ca. 1912. Credit: Wellcome Collection

In order to complete this transformation- the most important part of all- was to be thin.

Before I go on, the people who used these ‘potions’ knew they were poison and they did not care. So it should come as no surprise that in order to attain the perfect body- which until this point happened before death or a week later- people were willing to take The Tapeworm Diet.

Despite the skin crawling thought  of purposely ingesting a parasite into your body that would stop most of us from trying this, there  were reported cases or stories that had tried it and that  they had died  trying to swallow the worms live- which is the only way this stomach turning plan would work.

With that being said, those two red flags did  nothing to stop those trying to perfect their bodies who lived ( if they survived their other ‘beauty treatments ) in hope that the tape worm method would work.

I have read that the entire Tape Worm treatment was a myth. Nobody was swallowing live Tape Worms or even trying too.

But the story was out there at the time, it created a demand for the treatment, so someone began manufacturing pills said to contain the worm that were easy to swallow. Of course a dead worm wasn’t going to ‘help’ you so I guess people were being dosed with something that ate  away at their bodies in the same fashion as a tape worm.

Cropped from:
A sickly young woman sits covered up on a balcony; death (a ghostly skeleton clutching a scythe and an hourglass) is standing next to her; representing tuberculosis. Watercolour by R. Cooper, ca. 1912. Credit: Wellcome Collection