A lot has changed in the decades since the rule of Queen Victoria.
Sure, people are still pretty messed up in modern times too.
But the things that used to go down in the late 19th century were some of the weirdest,
strangest practices we've ever heard of.
Here are some of things about that time period that'll make you especially glad to be living
in the 21st century.
Death photography
The Victorians were kinda, sorta obsessed with death.
And it makes sense when you consider the smorgasbord of diseases that stalked Victorians — measles,
scarlet fever, diphtheria, rubella, typhus, cholera — you name it.
It was a sort of gauntlet of death that children and adults alike ran through every day.
Those very real threats and sense of loss led to people keeping trinkets of their dead,
like locks of hair and photos of their lifeless bodies.
At the time, photographs were still new and barely affordable, so oftentimes, families
waited until a loved one had passed before ever taking a snapshot of them.
To do so, the bodies were kept at home during the mourning period and staged with children
or siblings to pretend as if they were alive during the shot.
Some photos even showed faces with open eyes to really capture the creepy essence of it
all.
"You're really messed up."
And here you thought those glamour shots from the '80s were awkward.
Gravedigger
Gross Anatomy is an important course for medical students.
It gives them practice slicing and dicing on a human cadaver before they start turning
their scalpels towards the living.
And in the Victorian Era, it was common for students to learn by dissecting those who'd
been sentenced to death for a crime.
But once Britain passed a law that made fewer offenses punishable by death in 1823, those
students had to look elsewhere for training time.
Instead of lingering around the executioner's chamber, body merchants started hitting the
cemeteries to dig the dead out of their graves to sell them to med students.
And they fetched a pretty penny for them, too.
The fresher the body, the more in-demand it was.
So when cemeteries started installing watchtowers and guards, body snatchers had to get creative.
Sometimes that meant turning those shovels into murder weapons, and skipping the graveyard
altogether.
Whether the students buying these bodies were aware or not, that certainly seems to run
afoul of the hippocratic oath.
But that's not even the craziest thing they did with dead bodies in that era.
Corpse medicine
If pharmaceuticals and aggressive treatment plans freak you out now, just imagine what
it was like to have your doctor prescribe you a dose of human skull back in the day.
"Corpse medicine" was a very real thing — and it's pretty much exactly like it sounds.
This practice was at its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, but still lingered well
into the Victorian era as well.
Medical texts specified what body parts were good for what ailments, and there were recipe
books that detailed how to prepare the pieces to peak deliciousness, too.
For example, skull shards were commonly served with chocolate as a cure for apoplexy.
Executioners were often linked to corpse medicine, so it wasn't uncommon for them to do double
duty as a bringer-of-death and healer-of-the-poor, selling pints of warm blood from the recently
dead for people to drink.
Bad medicine
There was no shortage of reasons a woman could find herself committed to an insane asylum
in the Victorian era, and once she was there, doctors had some unorthodox methods of administering
their cures.
One way was to just remove all of a woman's reproductive organs in the hopes that would
dial down the perceived craziness.
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke, for example, was the superintendent at the London Asylum for the
Insane for several decades and performed hundreds of surgeries on his patients, from hysterectomies
to uterine adjustments.
In 1898, he gave a speech to the American Medico-Psychological Association, detailing
some of his cases, like a woman identified as LM.
He said she had violent tendencies and seizures and was diagnosed with "intense irritation
of both ovaries."
After they were removed, he claimed she "was quite well."
Think about that the next time you hear about the side effects for antidepressants on TV.
Baby farmers
If you thought these practices were dark, just wait 'til you hear about the Victorian-era
baby farmers.
At the time, birth control wasn't as sophisticated as it is now, so an unwanted pregnancy could
be devastating to a family.
That's where the baby farmers came in.
These people would take in unwanted babies for a fee, with the promise of finding them
a new home or becoming full-time caregivers themselves.
Only, not all of them actually placed these children into new families.
Instead, they'd collect their fees and then just execute the babies anyway.
The worst of the worst was Amelia Dyer, who provided her services to desperate mothers
for more than 30 years.
She charged the equivalent of $10,000 in today's cash value, and at the time of her capture,
was taking in an average of six babies every day.
She was convicted after the body of baby Helena Fry was fished out of the Thames River, and
she admitted to police that every baby strangled with tape was her victim.
It's not known how many she killed, but the number is somewhere in the hundreds.
It doesn't get much grislier than that.
A separation sale
Divorce wasn't legal in England until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which meant
estranged spouses had to find another way out of an unhappy marriage.
As a result, wife-selling became a completely legitimate way to get out of a marriage, and
it continued well through the 19th century, particularly in rural Britain.
According to research, wife sales could happen in public or in private.
But the public sales were quite the spectacle.
The husband typically put some kind of rope on his unwanted wife, took her to a public
square, and asked for offers.
"(rapid auction talking)"
So, it was sort of like eBay, but with your wife instead of an old smartphone.
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