Our Quirky World
by Alan Lawrie
Excerpts from Our Quirky World
Bodies and the Medical Profession
Today, we are in awe of advances in the medical profession. Doctors, nurses, scientists and support staff that save our lives and protect us. But, cast a thought back to ancient practices (and, in some cases still performed in the last century)... scary stuff indeed.
For example, the generally accepted cure for treatments of ulcers on female genitalia was the use of python bile. (How on earth did they arrive at that conclusion?) And, who caught the snakes?
Ancient Chinese medicine prescribed elephant bile mixed with water to cure bad breath (halitosis) - Sure, everyone had a local elephant on hand - whilst mint grew freely almost everywhere.
How about snail slime to remove warts? They positioned a snail to slime walk over your wart then killed it. As the snail died, it also removed your wart? Arghhh!
Sigmund Freud was renowned for his contributions to psychology, but he persisted also in prescribing cocaine to his patients too. (A neat way of ensuring his patients came back for more treatment?). In fact, many 19th century doctors championed the use of cocaine for relief of depression, migraines and toothaches. Today they are called Pushers.
For other ailments which physicians had trouble diagnosing, there was an old medical practice of blood letting using leeches or terrifying metallic instruments to cut into you. You either survived somehow or at least died quickly.
Got a sexually transmitted disease? No problem. From the Renaissance until the early 20th century, Mercury was used as a popular medicine for sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis. While some accounts claimed the heavy metal treatment was successful in fighting off the infection, patients often died from liver and kidney damage caused by mercury poisoning.
Haemorrhoids were treated with sizzling hot irons burning them away and cauterises the wound... the origin of branding, maybe?
A classic remedy for children’s coughs was discovered and manufactured by the famous German pharmaceutical company BAYER - more famous for aspirin.
They advertised heroin as the cure for coughs for those children which sounds wrong, until you realise Bayer’s parent company helped the Nazis exterminate millions of Jews. So in the scheme of things, what’s a little heroin?
Lost your libido, Madame? We have a cure for that too. Ancient Egyptians prescribed lizards blood, dead mice, mud and mouldy bread all to be used as topical ointments and dressings, and women were sometimes dosed with horse saliva to sort it out. (A suggestion of foreplay might have tickled her fancy back then)!
Coco Cola was invented in 1886 by Pemberton and was patented as a cure for headaches, fatigue and above all a hangover cure.(Unless you added whiskey to it?) The “Coca” bit came from the basic ingredient of cocaine - legal at that time - and the drink was merrily addictive. By the late 1920’s all traces of the drug were removed by law. And, today, it is still addictive and their magic formula a safely guarded secret. So, which ingredients replaced cocaine? It was caffeine and sugar. Sugar being the new hidden killer.
Now in the 21st century we have other things to scare the pants off us, here is a little humour on the sector to lighten up with...
The Custom of April Fools day, April 1st.
Another form of humour is the prank and prankster. Virtually every country in the world devises a harmless, practical joke on April 1st in a jovial way (an adjective for Jupiter or Zeus, King of the Gods on Mount Olympus renowned for his sense of mirth, joy and laughter - one thinks of the actor Brian Blessed making an excellent Zeus). The idea is to fool you but it often has a reverse effect where fooled people take it all literally.
Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect: In 1976, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners of BBC Radio 2 that unique alignment of two planets would result in an upward gravitational pull making people lighter at precisely 9:47 am that day. He invited his audience to jump in the air and experience "a strange floating sensation". Dozens of listeners phoned in to say the experiment had worked, among them a woman who reported that she and her 11 friends were "wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room.”
It is generally agreed that greatest hoax ever was. “The Spaghetti Tree Harvest”
In 1957, the BBC broadcast a film in their Panorama current affairs series purporting to show Swiss farmers picking freshly-grown spaghetti, in what they called the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. The BBC were soon flooded with requests to purchase a spaghetti plant, forcing them to declare the film a hoax on the news the next day.
If you google BBC Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino on YouTube you will see for yourself how this 3 minute cleverly constructed footage fooled everyone. The BBC with its voice of authority, perfect English and deadpan delivery would not be allowed to pull a stunt like this today.
On April 1, 1957, the BBC TV show "Panorama" ran a segment about the Swiss spaghetti harvest enjoying a "bumper year" thanks to mild weather and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil. Many credulous Britons were taken in, and why not? The story was on television -- then a relatively new
invention -- and Auntie Beeb would never lie, would it?
The story was ranked the No. 1 April Fools' hoax of all time by the Museum of Hoaxes website -- a fine source for all things foolish.
Also ….People obeying hoax messages to telephone "Mr C. Lion" or "Mr L. E. Fant" and suchlike on a telephone number that turns out to be a zoo, sometimes cause a serious overload to zoos' telephone switchboards.
Here is an April Fool’s day stunt in Denmark regarding its new Metro. It looks as if one of its carriages had an accident, and had broken through and surfaced on the square in front of the town hall. In reality, it was a retired carriage from Stockholm’s Metro (Underground) cut obliquely, with the front end placed onto the paving and loose tiles scattered around it. Note the sign "Gevalia" (a coffee company) and the accident site tape with the words "Uventede gæster?" (unexpected guests?). Gevalia's advertising featured various vehicles popping up with unexpected guests. Brilliant Advertising coup.
No one seems to be sure how all this originated but in 1686, a certain John Aubrey referred to April 1st as ‘Fooles Holy Day”
(That incidentally is where we get the word Holi-day) as the first British reference to it. On April 1st 1698 several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to see the Lions washed.
This wonderful tradition survives because it gives us all light hearted relief from daily stress.
The Taco Liberty Bell
The Taco Liberty Bell was an April Fool's Day joke played by fast food restaurant chain Taco Bell. The ad was created by Jon Parkinson and Harvey Hoffenberg who worked at Bozell, the Taco Bell advertising agency at the time.
In this now-classic 1996 prank, Taco Bell took out newspaper ads saying it had bought the Liberty Bell "in an effort to help the national debt." Even some senators were taken in, and the National Park Service even held a press conference to deny the news. At noon, the fast-food chain admitted the joke and said it was donating $50,000 for the landmark bell's care. Thousands of people had called Taco Bell headquarters and the National Park Service before it was revealed at noon on April 1 that the story was a hoax. The value of the joke, of course, was priceless.