People have always been fascinated by the bizarre and macabre. During the nineteenth century, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris was not a famous monument or an art gallery, but the city morgue. At its peak between 1830 and 1864, it boasted of around 40,000 visitors a day as people flocked to […]
Author Archives: Danielle Dray
The Most Curious Cravings: Pica
Pica is a psychological disorder that causes a strong desire to consume non-food items, such as dirt, glass, or hair. The phenomenon was first described by Hippocrates, and is usually found most often in children, though they usually grow out of it. Occasionally, adults are also diagnosed with the disorder, though genuine cases can be […]
The Tonsil Problem: Surgical Bravado and Childhood Trauma
Following both the First and Second World Wars, children came to be viewed as ‘citizens of the future’, and there was an increasing concern for their health, welfare and education. Following the formation of the NHS in 1948, many children were regularly seeing doctors for the first time, and this increased the rate at which […]
Freaks of Nature: Animal Abnormalities
During the early nineteenth century there was a huge interest in physical anomalies in both humans and animals, both from a scientific point of view as well as a more voyeuristic fascination from the general public. There was a huge demand for taxidermied and preserved specimens of deformed animals, and many such examples were showcased […]
Remember You Must Die: Memento Mori and the Art of Victorian Mourning
In times before modern medicine and the introduction of health and safety legislation, it was common for people to die young, and to die suddenly and unexpectedly. Since the beginning of human history, people have followed a huge variety of grieving rituals in order to mourn the dead. However, the Victorians famously made something of […]
The Man with the Silver Jaw
The case of Alphonse Louis is one of the earliest and most famous examples of the use of a prosthetic jaw. Not only was the piece a masterful piece of craftsmanship, it also returned the patient in question to a relatively normal life after he suffered a horrific disfigurement. War Injuries Today, most facial prosthetics […]
Gout: A Most Desirable Disease
Gout is a painful type of arthritis caused by an excess of uric acid in the blood, which then builds up in the joints, causing painful swelling and inflammation. Though not typically dangerous, it can be debilitating if untreated. The condition is usually caused by overconsumption of alcohol and fatty foods combined with general inactivity. […]
Leprosy: The Ancient Scourge
Leprosy is one of the oldest known diseases, with written references to sickness that scholars suspect were leprosy dating back to as early as 1500 BC. Geneticists have traced the origins of the disease to East Africa, where it spread across the continent and then to Europe by following human movement along trade and migration […]
It’s all in your Head: The Phrenology Movement
Phrenology is the idea that the shape of the head is a physical manifestation of the personality. By feeling the shape and contours of a subject’s head, phrenologists believed they could determine their overall personality, including any predisposition they might have to insanity or criminality. The theory was developed in 1796 by Franz Joseph Gall, […]
A Picture of Health: Asylum Photography
Before the reform movement of the mid 1800s, insane asylums were seen as little more than dumping grounds for those who were considered to have no place in society. Likewise, the people who found themselves confined in ‘madhouses’ were often regarded with fear and ridicule. There were many different theories about what caused mental illness, […]