Hold Still

Some trends are more curious than others, as this tour through the Cabinet will prove.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Before we get into
this story, I'd like to give a little content warning.

(00:33):
This episode contains discussions about extreme weight loss. If that
topic is triggering for you, please feel free to skip
this one. And if you are a loved one is
struggling with an eating disorder, please contact the National Eating
Disorder Association by texting n e DA to seven four
one seven four one. In century, thin was all the rage.

(01:02):
In fact, the more sick you looked, the better. Beauty
trends during the Victorian era involved a pale complexion of
tiny wiste and a frail body. If you're thinking that
this sounds more like a hospital patient than a model,
well you'd actually be right. These beauty standards were based
on the appearance of people with tuberculosis. Yes, you heard
that right, tuberculosis. In the late eighteenth century, consumption as

(01:25):
it was known had become completely intertwined with feminine beauty.
Thinness was already considered a desirable trait for women to have,
and of course the very thinnest women were the ones
who were dying. Looking like you were wasted away was
en vogue. You got bonus points if you could emulate
some of the other physical signs of the disease as well.
You see, while frailty was the main draw, TB also

(01:48):
gave it sufferers sparkling eyes and a pretty blush across
their cheeks and lips, both of which were actually the
result of a low grade fever. While it may not
sound appealing to us today, this tuberculosis chic was all
the rage, and its grip on society lasted for over
one hundred years. Of course, looking like you're dying when
you're knots is actually pretty hard to do, and losing

(02:10):
enough weight to fit into this ideal was very, very difficult,
So some people got creative diet pills and potions started
to gain popularity in the nineteenth century. A lot of them, though,
were more likely to kill you than help you whittle
away your waist.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
See. A lot of these pills had ingredients like arsenic
and strychnine in them, and if you took too many
at once, you could poison yourself. Arsenic, though, is tame
compared to the worst ingredient used for weight loss. That
honor actually goes to tapeworms. Yeah, tapeworms. Evidence points to
these parasites first being used for weight loss in the

(02:45):
mid nineteenth century in London. People would swallow pills with
tapeworm larvae in them, and then the worm would hatch
and would take up residents inside the body. The idea
was that you could eat as much as you wanted
and leave the dinner table satisfied, but since the worm
was eating all of your food, you would never gain
any weight. In fact, in the end you would probably
lose quite a few pounds. It was a risky gamble,

(03:08):
to be sure, because weight loss might not even have
been the only result. Tapeworms can cause headaches, eye problems, epilepsy,
and early onset dementia. It's hard to imagine risking so
much for the shallow promise of losing weight, but people
were willing to go far to be considered beautiful. They
were even willing to deal with the traumatic aftermath of
the parasite leaving their system. Once the tapeworm's host decided

(03:32):
that they had lost enough weight, they were supposed to
take an anti parasite pill, which would kill off the worm.
At least that was the idea, and when the worm
was dead, the host was supposed to excrete the worm
in what was sure to be the worst bathroom session
of their entire life. Not only would it be terrifying
and painful, but it could also cause serious abdominal and
rectal issues. If you didn't want to kill the worm, though,

(03:54):
it was believed that you could always lure it out
with a cup of milk. It's a ridiculous theory that
likely did not work, but if it did, then the
host would still have to deal with the tapeworm's unfortunate
exit strategy into the toilet. It's said that the tapeworm
diet made its way to America in nineteen twelve. However,
many government officials at the time were skeptical that it
was actually in the States. The Surgeon General denied having

(04:16):
seen evidence of tapeworm pills in America, and the American
Medical Association outright denied the pill's existence at all anywhere,
be it in America or Europe. There is still debate
among historians on whether or not the tapeworm pill was
largely distributed, or if working tapeworm pills were ever distributed
at all. Some believe that they absolutely did exist. After all,

(04:39):
the Victorians were willing to poison themselves for a thinner waste.
What was a parasite compared to that? Others say that
they were always a hoax, made up as satire to
show how far fad diets had gone. The most accepted
theory is that it was never a super popular diet fad,
but that plenty of people definitely still try to take
these pills tried being the operative here. It's believed that

(05:01):
while some of these pills worked, many others were just duds.
Whether they were a scam from the beginning or the
worm died before hatching, a lot of these pills never
resulted in a live parasite. The important thing here, though,
is that people wanted to lose weight so badly they
were willing to risk their health and their lives and
a very unfortunate new neighbor in their intestines to achieve

(05:23):
that goal. And that is the real horror of this story.
Thanks to smartphones, we have a camera always ready to

(05:44):
record at a moment's notice, whether we're documenting accident footage
for our insurance company or snapping a shot of our
kids Little League home run. Our phones have become like
extensions of our brains, holding all of our memories for us.
But those tiny cameras have another talent shame. I'm sure
we've all eagerly watched the footage of an entitled customer

(06:04):
lashing out in a store because they didn't get what
they wanted. Some people call it cancel culture, but really
those videos are just documentary evidence that leads to consequences
for the offending party. But the idea of publicly shaming
someone is nothing new. It predates our smartphones. Heck, it
predates the Internet and television and the printing press. All
we have to do is look back at Italy during

(06:25):
the Renaissance. Now, when we think of the Italian Renaissance,
we picture artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli
painting and sketching the people in places around them. But
these works were not just a way for painters to
express themselves. Some art had a specific purpose. It was
called petura infamante, which in English meant defaming portrait. When

(06:48):
someone was caught stealing or accused of fraud or traitorous behavior,
they became the subject of special paintings hung everywhere that
they could be seen. They were usually painted to publicly
shame those who could not be dealt with in a
normal legal context, and those depictions were pretty tough. Often
the subject, who was always a man by the way,
was painted hanging upside down or present among animals such

(07:11):
as donkeys or pigs, creatures that were deemed unclean, and
below the images, captions explaining what the person had done
wrong were written so that everyone walking by would know
what they were guilty of. Now, to be clear, this
type of punishment wasn't for everyone. Since the poor would
have nothing to lose by being defamed, they would be
punished outright. Petura infamante was typically reserved for the rich,

(07:33):
who didn't just value their wealth, but their reputations within
the community as well, and the conditions in which they
were depicted also mattered. Hanging was a method of execution
used primarily for the lower class, while upper class criminals
had the luxury of being beheaded a quick and relatively
painless death, and to be shown hanging upside down was

(07:53):
doubly offensive, as that position was viewed as comedic and
unbecoming of someone of means and status. Many of these
defaming portraits were hung in the Bargello, a massive palace
first built in twelve fifty five. It's originally housed high
ranking government officials before it was converted into everything from
a prison, to a military barracks to an art museum.

(08:14):
But for a time it was a popular venue for
frescoes and portraits of local fraudsters, painted by the likes
of both Icelli and Andrea del Castagno. After all, the
men in these portraits had to be recognizable, so only
the best artists were hired to paint them. Some scholars
and art historians argue that these works were not just
meant to humiliate the wealthy, but also to remind others

(08:34):
of what awaited them in the event that they broke
the law. Step out of line and find your face
hanging literally upside down on the walls of the Bargello. Unfortunately,
no frescoes survived to this day. The only evidence of
these paintings that we have today are some preparatory sketches
done in advance of the colorful portraits, some of which
were drawn by Da Vinci himself. Interestingly enough, though most

(08:57):
modern tarot decks also contain a nod to the picture
Infamante of old. The card, known as the hang Demand
shows an individual hanging upside down by one leg, a
common pose from many Renaissance to Faming portraits. Tarot cards
were invented in northern Italy in the mid fourteen hundreds,
so it's possible that the card's design was influenced by
these portraits. But did petura infamante work. Were rich men

(09:19):
discouraged from committing fraud or treason? Maybe maybe not. After all,
money and power make people behave in very curious ways.
But it was also probably the cheapest way to get
one's portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe

(09:42):
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast book series and television s, and you can
learn all about it over at theworldoflore dot com. And

(10:05):
until next time, stay curious.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
H