Medicine, law, war, and business were all very different 100 years ago, but not always
for the better and frequently for the downright creepy, like arranged marriages for child brides.
And that's just the start. Here are some creepy things that were considered normal 100 years ago.
For most of history, a newborn baby was generally viewed as one part future laborer, and one part
old age insurance policy. Children were expected to work from a very young age, helping around
the farm, house, or business. By the turn of the 20th century, as the economy evolved and
urbanization continued, children were employed in a great variety of industries and trades.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics keeps track of these things. They say that,
in addition to the traditional farming and agricultural field labor that they'd always done,
100 years ago, rural youth could also be employed in resource extraction. That means things like
mining, and breaking up and hauling coal. In coastal towns, you could find children fishing,
shoring, shucking oysters, or canning. In cities and towns of all sizes,
children were employed by mills and factories, making everything from glass products to textiles
to kitchenware to cigars. The big cities had legions of children buzzing around as couriers,
drivers, cleaners, newsies, and much more.
Child labor was integral to just about every level of the U.S. economy,
but the children themselves usually didn't even get to enjoy their wages.
Generally speaking, society saw kids as an extra money-earning appendage of their parents.
On January 17, 1920, after a decades-long effort
to convince Americans that society would be improved by banning liquor,
the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States was made illegal. The teetotalers were
wrong though. America turned into a bizarre mirror of itself where the government tried
to poison you, while cops and politicians took their orders from the Mafia and the KKK.
Resistance to Prohibition appeared immediately. Maryland flatly refused to enforce it,
and many states and municipalities underfunded enforcement.
Banning the production and sale of alcohol didn't diminish the desire, so naturally,
a market emerged to supply it. And since alcohol was now a most profitable substance, bootleggers
and Mafia bosses who sold it had lots of money to bribe police officers, politicians, and judges.
Police were openly corrupt, and since Prohibition was largely driven by racist, anti-immigrant and
anti-Catholic attitudes, it helped fuel the Ku Klux Klan's resurgent terror campaign.
Thirsty Americans risked prison to buy beer, and sometimes their lives. Homemade booze, sometimes
referred to as "bathtub gin," killed four times as many people during Prohibition than alcohol
did prior to banishment. By 1926, these deaths were less accidental and more deliberate. Since
much of the homemade liquor was distilled using industrial alcohols, the feds increased the amount
of methanol, a deadly poison, required to make those industrial alcohols. Famed humorist Will
Rogers quipped that, quote, "governments used to murder by the bullet only. Now it's by the quart."
Yersinia pestis is a pretty famous bacterium. It has the greatest stage name ever, the Black Death,
and it rocked the 14th century so hard that one third of Europe died from its effects.
Bubonic plague however, wasn't just a problem for Europeans dead
hundreds of years ago. There were over 1,000 cases in the U.S. during the 20th century.
Bubonic plague is primarily transmitted by fleabites, specifically from fleas carried
by rats. Rats that came to the U.S. aboard steamships bound for San Francisco in 1900.
That city's Chinatown hosted the very first U.S. outbreak of the plague, and it scared
California's leaders so much that they conspired to hide it from the rest of the country. San
Francisco's mayor and the state governor, along with their willing accomplices in California's
media and business titans, actually secured the collaboration of the surgeon general of the United
States in covering up the plague outbreak. At least 172 people died before the outbreak ended.
The first 25 years of the 20th century saw over 500 cases of plague, and they would usually be in
port towns. In 1920, Galveston, Texas, was home to another outbreak. This time, the city acted
quickly. The source of the disease was discovered, which as always was rats, and Galveston embarked
on a two-year rodent murder spree that helped end the outbreak with only 11 dead.
Health care wasn't a pleasant experience in the early 20th century. For women,
it was worse. It will probably be of little surprise that women faced challenges entering
medicine. But they were also excluded from medical research for a very long time. So long in fact,
that including females in medical research trials was only made mandatory in 2016! This
exclusion probably contributed to the baffling diagnoses and treatments that women could expect.
One popular 1907 book on pregnancy instructed doctors to prep pregnant women by bathing their
lady part with bichloride — which is a highly toxic substance now used primarily as a fungicide.
Male ignorance of women's medicine wasn't all bad. A popular treatment to the dreaded female
"hysteria," whose symptoms could basically be any behavior that men didn't like,
purportedly involved doctors giving patients a pelvic massage until they
were…satisfied. As shown in the 2012 film Hysteria, a visionary hero eventually arose
and invented an "electromechanical" treatment, which helped to lead to today's adult toys.
Eugenics is the pseudoscientific theory that humans can consciously improve the
species through racism. For decades, governments around the world tried to improve their citizens.
Not their lives mind you, but the citizens themselves. Eugenics is a breeding program
for humanity, essentially an effort to breed ourselves into a better species.
The president of the American Natural History Museum declared
in his opening address to a 1923 eugenics conference that responsible governments
should make sure the individual races stay in their place and not pollute
each other through interbreeding. Those who proved unfit should be sterilized.
In fact, the famous Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had
some very disturbing words to say when he voted to uphold several sterilization laws:
"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."
In all, 32 states passed some kind of eugenics law at some point. Eugenics was popular and considered
progressive. Leaders of organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU joined luminaries like
Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell in supporting eugenics programs. California,
with its high levels of anti-Mexican and anti-Asian attitudes, was particularly aggressive,
and successful. Over 20,000 Californians were sterilized in the 20th century.
Health care might have looked scary for women 100 years ago, but mental health care was terrifying
for everyone. It probably shouldn't surprise you that an era obsessed with science and new
technology might produce psychiatric treatments that looked more like the work of sci-fi author
Philip K. Dick than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Treatment for mental illness was fashionable for eugenics supporters.
States commonly prohibited marriage for individuals with mental illness
or went one step further and sterilized them. Over 65,000 mentally ill U.S. citizens were
sterilized until the last such operation in Oregon, which actually occurred in 1981!
Schizophrenia could be treated with insulin shock therapy,
where patients were given progressively larger doses of insulin, leaving them at high risk for
brain damage. One New Jersey doctor thought mental illness was caused by untreated infections and
went on a 20-year spree of unnecessarily removing teeth, tonsils, and even organs from patients
searching for the cause of mental illnesses. He killed 30 to 45 percent of his victims.
But it wouldn't be the early 20th century without electricity and sexism. There was
electroshock therapy, which induces seizures by electrocuting the patient, and that particular
therapy is still practiced today. Though not to the horrific levels of 100 years ago.
And even as women fought for the right to vote, there were still doctors who went so
far as to claim a direct connection between women's reproductive organs and insanity.
This resulted in many women sent to asylums for obvious signs of "insanity," which — like
so-called hysteria in the 19th century — could be pretty much anything men didn't like.
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