Happy October 1st! 
The spooky season is upon us, and although we celebrate the macabre all year long on Veinity Fair, it’s time for some more supernatural-themed Victorian trivia! Apart from new comics, I’ll be also reposting Halloween favorites from previous years on my social media. 
Let me know which 19th-century spooky stories interest you the most!
Many Victorians enjoyed sugary treats in amounts unimaginable to the previous generations. This combined with poor hygiene and dentistry only in its infancy caused high levels of tooth decay. 
In many cases the rotting teeth couldn’t be saved and had to be extracted, leaving people with rather toothless smiles. Not all was lost though, at least not to those who could afford a nice set of dentures. 
Replacement teeth were traditionally made of ivory (like walrus, hippopotamus, or elephant), but could be prone to breaking and discoloring. A better solution turned out to be making ivory-based dentures set with … real human teeth. 
There were a few popular ways to obtain those: buying them from the poor, forcing them out of unfortunate victims (often enslaved people), and using resurrectionists’ services to dig up some teeth from graves or ransack casualties at battlefields. It is said that one of the biggest teeth scavenging took place after the Battle of Waterloo, giving the name to “Waterloo teeth”.
Check out photos of real Waterloo teeth in this BBC article.
19th-century ‘Ambition Pills’ were supplements for men that promised to get rid of a variety of problems: impotence, sleeplessness, enlarged veins, and nervous debility. 
Unsurprisingly, a few decades after the introduction of those pills, a study found that their ingredients were questionable. In 1918, the Journal of the American Medical Association found that each pill contained “a little over one-thirtieth of a grain of strychnin” and that it was “possible for any one to purchase enough strychnin in a single box of Wendell’s Ambition Pills to kill an adult.” 
I know you’ve all been waiting for the great comeback of our favorite poison – arsenic. 
In 1874, a surprising medical case investigated by doctor Wintreberg was described in “Revue de Thérapeutique Médico-Chirurgicale.” One of Wintreberg’s patients was suffering from recurring and painful anal ulcers, and there was no indication as to what could have caused them. Lotions, enemas, special diet – nothing helped for long. After some time it turned out that a few other members of the family started experiencing the same symptoms, which gave Wintreberg a clue as to what was going on. After a brief “investigation” it turned out the culprit was … green poster paper the family used in their latrines. 
Tests confirmed that the poster paper contained copper arsenite! 
Fortunately, it was enough for the family to throw the paper away to ease their symptoms.
You can find his and other bizarre stories about arsenic in “Kolor śmierci, odcień grobu czyli 50 odcieni morderczej zieleni” by a friend of mine, Wiktoria Król. Unfortunately, the book is only available in Polish right now, but who knows what the future holds!
The majority of Victorians had little knowledge on how diseases spread and what to do to treat them. 
Even the most educated ones were divided between the miasmatic theory and the germ theory of disease for decades; and physicians’ advice could be wildly contradictory. 
Add to that hundreds of ‘cure-all’ drugs, which often were more harmful than the diseases themselves, and we get a picture of utter chaos and misinformation. No wonder many Victorians decided to trust more traditional remedies to which they were used, even if it meant using bizarre ingredients. One of the favorite traditional remedies were liquids and ointments with… earthworms. 
These products were used for bruises and were based on a recipe that had been around from medieval times! The worms were first boiled in oil and then broken up in a mortar and mixed with wine and other ingredients. Then the mixture was boiled and used in a liquid form on the bruises.
Max Joseph von Pettenkofer was a Bavarian chemist known for his research on practical hygiene and implementing many hygiene-related standards in German cities, including improving the state of drinking water, sewage disposal, and general cleanliness. 
While all of this work positively contributed to public health, it was also a result of Pettenkofer’s alignment with the miasmatic theory rather than the germ theory of disease. 
And even though Pettenkofer did not deny the existence of bacteria, he thought they weren’t enough to cause sickness and had to be accompanied by bad living conditions, miasmatic air, and dirt in general. This belief made him at odds with Robert Koch, the discoverer of the bacterium responsible for cholera outbreaks and proponent of the germ theory of disease. 
The two scientists did not see eye to eye with each other on how to deal with German cholera outbreaks in the 1880s, which only made things worse.
Pettenkofer was so adamant that Koch was wrong that he decided to perform a perplexing experiment on himself in 1892 (when he was 74!). To prove that cholera could not develop without poor hygiene and subsoil rather than drinking water, he decided to drink a cholera bouillon laced with bacteria isolated from the stool of a person who had already died of that disease. 
To make sure his experiment was viable, he decided to do it in front of an audience and obtained the sample from Koch himself. He had also emptied his stomach beforehand and neutralized any leftover acid with sodium bicarbonate. 
How this fantastic example of self-experimentation ended? After experiencing watery diarrhea for a week, Pettenkofer stated that he did NOT come down with cholera, and his symptoms were associated with something else. In reality, he contracted a mild case of cholera and was probably saved from death by the fact he already had had contact with the disease a few years earlier. When asked why he was willing to risk his own life, he stated “I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor.”
You can read more about this and other self-experiments in Who Goes First?
Have you ever heard of Turnspit dogs? 
If not, don’t worry, it might be because this breed used to be so common that people actually didn’t give it any second thought. 
Now extinct, these small creatures were described as “long-bodied, crooked-legged and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy look about them.” They were bred in order to run on a wheel (called a ‘turnspit) which in turn spun a cooking spit. 
While it is said the dogs enjoyed running, their job was very taxing and dangerous due to the closeness of the fire. Because of that, at least two dogs would work in a kitchen, taking shifts on the wheel as needed. Some dogs could find “employment” elsewhere, for example in a progressive pharmacy, where the turnspit could be used as a giant, canine-powered pestle and mortar. 
Several lucky Turnspit dogs spent their last years as Queen Victoria’s pets. 
As we already know, Victorians loved adding alcohol to their meds, even the ones advertised for kids. As it turns out, various spirits could also be added to a baby’s bath.
In Henry Allbutt’s “Every Mother’s Handbook” (1897), the author stands against this practice: “Again, some nurses add brandy or other spirits to the water in which a baby is first washed. Or if they don’t do this, they wash the baby’s head with the brandy, for the purpose they say, of strengthening it. Now, this is decidedly improper and must never be done, because the spirit evaporates very rapidly, and quickly produces a sensation of cold, which is both unpleasant and injurious to a newly-born child, by depriving it of some of its natural heat.”
A baffling cough medicine recipe from Constance Moore’s “Hints on Health from the Victorians.” It goes without saying that you should NOT try it!
As we already know, the Victorians were obsessed with ghastly pale complexion which was supposed to give them a more aristocratic look. This also included stigmatization of freckles as they were associated with the working class and outdoor labor in general. In part, freckles were also seen as a health problem resulting from the overproduction of yellow bile by the liver. One of the ways to treat this ‘problem’ was to bring balance to the four humors, either by purging or bloodletting.
Those unwilling to lose their blood over freckles could purchase products which were supposed to “gently” get rid of freckles. However, even pharmacists at the time spoke against these products, as they often contained highly invasive and poisonous ingredients like arsenic or lead. And while the first results could have been promising (rashing and peeling skin would reveal some lighter skin beneath), long-term effect included permanent skin damage and heavy metal poisoning. 
You may ask, “if they reeeally wanted to hide freckles, wouldn’t it be easier and safer to just put on some makeup?” Unfortunately color cosmetics fell out of favor at the time, when Queen Victoria deemed it vulgar and unfit for respectable ladies. 
Check out this Sawbones episode for more weird historical “cures” for freckles!
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