May 28, 2024 • 27 mins
Getting yourself a parasitic buddy will help you lose weight; the idea here is that the tapeworm lives in your intestines and eats whatever you’re eating, meaning you can go for seconds or thirds without feeling guilty about any of the calories. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Until the tapeworm part, that is. Tapeworms shouldn’t be inside your body unless it’s by accident, but if you lived in Victorian England, you might have intentionally swallowed one for weight loss.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership
with iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Urban legend originating from the mid nineteen fifties would have
you think. Opera singer Maria Kallis lost sixty five pounds
on the tapeworm diet, a diet where she allegedly swallowed
a parasite packed pill to consume calories for her Now
that's been debunked. It's confirmed by her biography and personal
(00:34):
communications that though she was diagnosed with a beef tapeworm,
it was due to eating raw meat and wasn't something
she did on purpose. But it probably goes without saying, though,
that humans have done some very strange things in the
name of beauty and fashion over the centuries. The tapeworm
diet was and unfortunately still is a real thing, and
(00:56):
it was once a super popular attempt at weight loss.
So let's talk tapeworms. Perhaps one of our grossest episodes yet,
Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And I'm Holly Frye. So getting yourself a parasitic buddy
will help you lose weight, But please, for the love
of all that's holy, don't do it. The idea here
is that the tapeworm lives in your intestines and basically
eats whatever you're eating, meaning you can go for seconds
and thirds without feeling guilty about any of the calories
(01:30):
is you're not absorbing them. That doesn't sound so bad
right until you get to the tapeworm part. That is,
tapeworm should not be inside your body period. They can
get in there by accident, though, and that can happen if,
for instance, you consume raw or undercooked meat that includes beef, pork,
or fish, or if you drink contaminated water. You could
(01:53):
also become infected after handling food, water, or objects that
have been contaminated with feces. Close physical contact with your dog,
such as allowing them to lick your face, is also
a risk for developing a tapeworm infection. However, if you
lived in London between roughly eighteen thirty and nineteen hundred,
(02:14):
there's a good chance you might have intentionally swallowed a
tapeworm for weight loss.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
The fad would also hit the United States, but not
until a bit later in the early nineteen hundreds. We
should note, though, that while we'll be talking about the
Victorian tapeworm diet. Tyra Banks talked about the diet on
her show back in two thousand and nine. Courtney Kardashian
joked about wanting a tapeworm as recently as twenty fifteen,
and in twenty thirteen, a woman from Iowa consumed tapeworm
(02:45):
pills for weight loss, which resulted in an official warning
from the Iowa State Department of Public Health. This is
one of those things that just hasn't gone.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Away, and that's maybe because the tapeworm diet sounds pretty easy.
All you needed was a little pill that was in
victorian times advertised with claims like easily swallowed, sanitized and
jar packed. One popular ad read Eat Eat, Eat, and
all was stay thin, no diet, no baths, no exercise,
(03:18):
no danger, guaranteed harmless fat. The enemy that is shortening
your life banished. How with sanitized tapeworms jar packed friends
for a fair form, easy to swallow, no ill effects,
prepared by wt Bridge chemist, New York, send no money,
(03:38):
particulars mailed free. To be clear, nothing about tapeworms is sanitary,
but product labels surely did proudly claim that their pills
were safe.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
How did this even become a thing? You might be
wondering these standards are problematic now, but in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, ideas about feminine beauty included pale skin,
rosy cheeks, red lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. Women
were also expected to be wafishly thin. A sixteen inch waist,
(04:12):
yes sixteen was ideal by some standards, and women also
needed to be graceful and polite, according to a series
of essays on the subject at the time, quote politeness
may be defined as a dexterous management of our words
and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion
of us and themselves.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
One of the most popular beauty guides of the era,
an unfortunate book called The Ugly Girl Papers, written by
SD Powers and published in eighteen seventy four, was a
sort of self help guide for the quote unquote ugly
women in society, with tips on how to become more beautiful,
and even stated that quote it is a woman's business
(04:55):
to be beautiful. Beauty takes time and effort, the book
bok explained, and if you wanted to find a husband,
you needed to put in the time. This body shaming
guide had the gall to recommend women find a quote
healthy balance in the pursuit of beauty, all while explaining
how to maintain one's figure or how to drop a
(05:16):
few pounds to be more attractive to others. The author claimed,
quote if stout, a girl should eat as little as
will satisfy her appetite, never allowing herself, however, to rise
from the table hungry enter the tapeworm.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But before we meet this parasite, we're going to take
a break forward from our sponsors. When we're back, we
will talk about the unreasonable standard of beauty women were
held to in the Victorian era and how women were
perceived if they did not fit that mold.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
We come back to criminalia. Let's start talking about tuberculosis
and how it ties in to the tapeworm diet.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So during this time, ideal feminine beauty was based on
the appearance of people who had tuberculosis, which was romanticized
during the era. For those characteristics we mentioned earlier, a
pale complexion, dilated pupils, and a frail thin physique. Tuberculosis
had reached epidemic levels in Europe and in the United
States by the mid nineteenth century. The disease targets the
(06:32):
lungs and also damages other organs, and before antibiotics were available,
if you had it, it meant a slow death march.
You died from what was then called consumption. During that time,
consumption was believed to be caused by a hereditary susceptibility
to it, as well as from unhealthy or so called
bad air known as miasmas. It wasn't known to be infectious.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Published in nineteen oh nine, the book Tuberculosis, a treatise
by American authors on its etiology, pathology, frequency, semiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention,
and treatment, outlines the illness this way quote, A considerable
number of patients have and have had for years, a delicate,
(07:18):
transparent skin, as well as fine silky hair. Those sparkling
or dilated eyes and rosy cheeks and lips that were
longed for were common in tuberculosis patients because their common
characteristics of an ongoing low grade fever, but that wasn't
known to the medical community at the time.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Desperate to achieve the coveted look, some Victorian women snacked
on wafers made of arsenic to give themselves that bright
eyed look as well as help them achieve a translucent complexion.
Eyedrops of belladonna were used to dilate pupils, which also
made eyes look bigger. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade,
can also cause blood kindness. Please don't try any of
(08:02):
this at home, and as we keep going, none of
it gets any healthier.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
This unrealistic image society set for women to live up to,
also used a woman's weight as a barometer of her intelligence,
her character, her sexuality, and even her sanity. In Victorian society,
excess weight was attributed to a woman's quote indolence of mind.
Go ahead and embrace yourself, because the body shaming only
(08:29):
gets worse from here. A nineteen hundred edition of The
Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette reported quote obesity always carries with
it physical and often mental weakness. In his eighteen ninety
seven book The Female Offender, author Cizar Lambroso, who was,
among other things, a eugenicist, claimed a connection between obesity
(08:51):
and sex work, stating quote, this greater weight among prostitutes
is confirmed by the notorious fact of the obesity of
those who grow old in their vile trade and who
gradually become positive monsters of adipose tissue. Taking another leap,
he goes on to conclude that quote female lunatics are
(09:12):
far more often exaggeratedly fat than men.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
A so called consumptive chic to cover the fashion world
of the mid eighteen hundreds, as women sought to avoid
being associated with all of that negative perception of carrying
any weight at all. To look as thin as possible
and achieve that ideal sixteen inch waist, women wore pointed
corsets and generous skirts to call attention to tiny waists,
(09:40):
and under those voluminous skirts, women appeared to glide as
they moved, adding an otherworldly dimension to their delicate comportment.
Women also attempted to mimic the consumptive ethereal appearance by
using white powder on their skin and by washing their
skin with arsenic yes. Again, the poison.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Tuberculosis chic was hot. Take for instance, Marie Duplessi, a
French Cortisan and Parisian celebrity. Today we would think of
someone like her as an influencer. She was a striking
Victorian beauty whose well known portrait by artist Edouar Vienna
shows off her shiny black hair. Framing her oval face.
(10:22):
Her eyes are sparkling, and she has pale ivory skin.
Duplessi got that sought after look because she was afflicted
with tuberculosis and she died from it at the age
of twenty three. To achieve that kind of beauty, women
bathed in ammonia and they wore body crushing corsets. And
some women chose more drastic measures, and that is ingesting
(10:45):
tapeworms by swallowing tapeworm pills. Those pills contained beef tapeworm larvae.
These larvae cysts would then hatch inside the body and
voila weight loss was now in progress.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
According to food historian Anny Gray Quote, during the nineteenth century,
dieting became big business. Advertising was becoming more and more sophisticated,
with more and more diet products being pedled. So let's
talk how these tapeworms fit in to consumptive chek.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
So, tapeworms, as we've been saying, are parasites. They're members
of the phylum Anelda, also known as segmented worms, and
that's a species that also includes pinworms and leeches. Segmented
worms can break off segments of their body and as
long as the head remains attached to its host, the
creature can regrow more segments. Tapeworms have three main parts.
(11:42):
The head, which is the part that attaches to intestines
and ingests nutrients from your body, the neck, which can
regenerate its body. And then there's the rest of the worm,
which consists of many segments that bear eggs. When those
eggs hatch, they detach from the rest of the tapeworm
and travel through the bloodstream to your muscles and to
(12:02):
your brain, liver, and other organs, where they develop into cysts.
If treatment to get rid of a tapeworm does not
eliminate the head and neck, it may as well be
useless because the entire worm can regrow.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Tapeworms generally don't cause more than minor symptoms, including things
like lack of appetite, diarrhea, nausea, weight loss of course,
and a craving for salty foods. But if those cysts
grow in the spine or brain rather than the intestine,
side effects could cause life threatening problems, including seizures, nerve pain,
(12:38):
muscle weakness, and cognitive changes. If the central nervous system
becomes infected, a person might experience hydrocephalous meningitis, and damage
to blood vessels in the brainstem or nerves. In some cases,
if the tapeworm grows long enough, it could lead to
obstruction of the bowel appendix or bialduct, which is a
medical emergency. And on ava ridge, an adult tapeworm is
(13:02):
about fifteen to thirty feet long. I mean, can you
imagine in you're intestine on purpose, and they weren't temporary guests.
You could host one for up to a decade. As
long as your symptoms were mild, you might not even notice.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So with all of that delicious imagery and mind, we're
going to take a break for a word from our sponsors,
and when we're back, we will talk about how one
might remove a tapeworm before anti parasitic drugs. It was
not especially easy.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about ways
tapeworms were removed before modern medicine. But first let's talk
about how maybe not a lot of those pills worked
as advertised anyway.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
When it comes down to both Victorian and modern dieters,
because that tapeworm diet just won't go away. Stories about
the effectiveness of this horrifying diet are actually kind of murky.
Modern historians disagree on whether people actually ingested any real
tapeworms from those pills, or whether the advertised products were
(14:20):
just simply placebos. Luckily, most of those tapeworm pills probably
didn't work because most of them were probably inactive, or
they just didn't even contain the active ingredient, which is
a funny thing to call a tapeworm at all. One example,
a product called Neutroids, marketed in the nineteen hundreds is
(14:40):
a weight loss supplement sold by doctor R. Lincoln Graham
of the Gram Sanatorium in New York City, contained ie
at all, magnesium carbonate, starch, talc, and a trace of iron.
But you'll notice that ingredients list contains absolutely no mention
of tapeworms.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
But for those who were actually infected, there's still one
thing we haven't talked about. Removing your tapeworm buckle up
because some of these will probably make you squirm. The
worm could theoretically leave your body on its own during
a bowel movement. Segments of a tapeworm can break off
and exit the body in your stool, and you would
(15:20):
be able to see them. Pieces of tapeworm in your
stool usually look flat and rectangular. They would be white
or a pale yellow, and they'd be the size of
a grain of rice, although sometimes they remain joined together
in a long chain of segments.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Today, if you find yourself in the unfortunate scenario where
you have a tapeworm, your doctor would prescribe what are
known as anthelmentic drugs, which treat parasitic infections. But before
the mid twentieth century, when the first modern anti parasitic
drugs hit the market, worms were treated in a few ways.
Purgative plants such as wormwood were used to both kill
(15:59):
the wor you were hosting and trigger your body to
expel it with about of rather severe diarrhea.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Another popular method of removing your tapeworm involved holding a
glass of milk at your mouth or near your anus,
and then waiting for the worm to come out. Theoretically,
it would head for that milk. Now, there is no
proof that milk can coax or remove a parasite, but
when it comes to folk remedies, it can be hard
to shake. And then there's this method. Terry Deary, in
(16:33):
his book Horrible Histories Vile Victorians, describes a method invented
by a doctor Myers of Sheffield, England, in which cylinders
stuffed with food were inserted into a person's digestive tract.
Patients were then instructed not to eat for a few days,
so that the tapeworms looking for a meal would theoretically
(16:54):
be lured into those traps. Tapeworms would then be coaxed
out of the body with the aforementioned milk method, and
while a glass of milk wasn't really going to help,
at least it was a fairly benign treatment in comparison,
some people choked to death on these cylinders.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was
a better understanding of tuberculosis when in eighteen eighty two,
Robert Coch announced that he discovered the bacteria that causes
the disease. In eighteen sixty one, Louis Pasteur had introduced
germ theory, a breakthrough that proved microscopic organisms invisible germs
(17:32):
were a cause of infection rather than something like bad air.
Building on that, Koch's understanding of tuberculosis helped germ theory
gain more legitimacy, and it also convinced both public health
experts and physicians that tuberculosis was a contagious disease.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
For those desperate to lose weight, whatever their motivation to
do so, tapeworms maybe sounded more appealing or potentially quicker
than things like changing your diet and exercise habits. The
United States Food and Drug Administration officially banned tapeworm pills,
but there's no ban on the unrealistic expectations of female
(18:12):
beauty then or now, I think we need to drink
to make this just wash away from.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I think so tia. But this comes with a bit
of a secondary history lesson. Are you ready, let's do it.
We mentioned one of the treatments was to consume wormwood. Yes,
and I can't let a mention of wormwood go by
and not talk about absence. Of course. So wormwood's scientific
name is Artemisia absyntheum. That's where absinthe gets its name.
(18:49):
It's an ornamental plant. It's native to Europe, although now
you can find it in other places. It has been
used medicinally since all the way back to ancient Egypt.
It was in the ebers Pyrus. It's also mentioned in
the Bible. Pliny the Elder talked about it Juliette's wet
nurse in Shakespeare's play speaks of weaning Juliet by putting
wormwood on her person because the bitter taste made nursing unappealing.
(19:14):
But it didn't become an alcohol until the seventeen hundreds,
when Pierre Ordinaire, who was a French doctor, is credited
with coming up with the first absinthe recipe in his
book The Complete Body of Distilling. That was in seventeen
thirty one, and it was still more than sixty years
before absinthe was bottled as a commercial product, which was
done by Henri Luis Perennaut, and once it was commercially available,
(19:38):
it was a huge hit, so much so that cocktail
hour in Paris got renamed le'overt which is the green hour.
And then absence spread from beyond France to the rest
of Europe and then eventually to the US, and people
really loved it, then they didn't, or some people loved
it and some people did not. A lot of people
(19:58):
got a legen addicted to it, and by the late
nineteenth century it was really easy to find editorials talking
about the dangers of absinthe and how it was fundamentally
evil and how it was going to ruin everybody. That
wave of anti absent thinking was helped by doctors who
had started to attribute a lot of issues to absinthe,
(20:19):
including various mental illnesses which were all grouped under the
nebulous umbrella of insanity, which made me think also of
how some doctors who were horrible made strange and unscientific
associations between carrying extra weight and being insane or whatnot.
And eventually they believed that they had isolated the specific
(20:40):
problem ingredient, which was wormwood in absinthe, which of course
contains a compound called thujone. Thujone is toxic, to be clear,
but the assessment of absent that the dawn of the
twentieth century wasn't accurate in terms of that theu jone
being dangerous, because there were actually studies that started to
come out talking about thu jon dangers and what it
(21:01):
could do to you. That's kind of why it was medicinal.
It had enough toxicity that you could use it to
do things like kill a tape.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Or kill a tape worm exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
And as the medical community and scientists started publishing papers,
absence started getting banned. Belgium was the first to ban
it in nineteen oh five, and then just ten years later,
by nineteen fifteen, almost I think every European country except
Spain had banned it. The US had also banned it,
and it stayed banned for a long time.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
It's interesting because that overlaps our time frame here with
killing tape worms with wormwood.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, exactly. It really wasn't like until eighty years after
it that people started looking at absinthe again and being like, wait,
what wasn't it that was so bad and really kind
of start to do analysis on whether it had actually
been toxic, And when those analyzes were performed, it really
became clear that the theu jone in absinthe really was
(22:04):
just adding a little bit of bitter flavor and sometimes
part of that green coloration we associate with it, but
there was nowhere near enough in it to be toxic.
So that idea that the wormwood in absinthe was what
made it dangerous was completely unfounded. All of those problems
that had been attributed to thujone and to absyinthe, it
(22:25):
was really just run of the mill alcoholism in a
lot of cases, and it was like the novel alcohol,
so that's why people were choosing it, and in some
cases I suspect there were also instances where people actually
did have some form of mental illness that they were
self medicating through heavy drinking because there was no one
recognizing what the real problem was to treat.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Them, and no real treatment at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Yeah, there was nothing to do, so like absinthe and
wormwood kind of got this bad rap for no actual
factual reason. By the way, that whole absinth causing hallucinations
thing is debunked left and right. It's kind of one
of those two sided coins. Both the people that were
into absinthe and the people that thought it was evil
were kind of both perpetuating that myth because people that
(23:14):
were really into it were like, it was amazing, it
was mind altering, it was the best thing I've ever had,
And people that thought it was evil were like, it
will mess up your mind. It's gonna make you like
they were saying the same thing but with different emphasis.
So as all of this scientific information started to become
a parent, slowly those bands started to roll back. There
(23:35):
are specific limits just in case on how much wormwood
can be included in production of absinth, but you can
buy it pretty readily almost anywhere. Now this has been
your absent advocacy minute, and now we're going to drink
some all right.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I like a little history lesson with my drink.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
This is a drink that I'm calling beauty standards, and
it is a really easy one because you make it
in the glass. It shares some DNA with a mule.
There are times when you do not want to directly
pour your alcohol and your mixing ingredients over ice, because
the ice starts to melt very quickly and dilute. In
(24:18):
the case of absinthe, I think it's fine you would
normally if you order an absinth in a bar, they're
gonna dilute it with water anyway. That's what that whole
sugar cube drop thing is going on when you get one.
So you're gonna put your ice, a good amount of
ice in your glass or your cup, whatever you're using.
You're gonna pour in an ounce of absinthe, a half
ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce of violet syrup,
(24:41):
and then you're gonna top that with two to four
ounces of ginger beer and just give it a stir.
The violet syrup and the absinthe. It's like drinking the
most beautiful bouquet in the world. Like all of the
herbaceous flavors of absinthe really come out, and the violet
it softens the edges of everything. It's so yummy and delicious.
(25:03):
I would like one right now.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
That's in a great list of ingredients that sounds like
a yummy drink.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Violet syrup is one of those things. If you don't
have it, I recommend getting some. You can make it.
It's a little bit tricky, so I recommend buying that one,
or at least I find it tricky. Somebody else would
be like what, it's easy, and every time I recommend
ordering some because it's just one of those syrups that's
like it adds to your bar cart or your backbar,
(25:28):
whatever you're using, like just this little like secret weapon
that you can use to make drinks feel a little elevated.
And if when you use it in lieu of simple syrup,
you can also throw it on, you know, a scone
or a cookie and it's I love violet syrup and everything.
The mocktail for this one is so easy. You're going
to do the exact same thing, but instead of using
any absynthe you will use like a half ounce instead
(25:51):
of an ounce of an anis or a licorice syrup.
That's it. Bump it down because at that point that
liquorice flavor gets really intense at a full ounce, so
you don't need that much, especially because you then have
two syrups going on. So I would in that case
probably also lean towards the heavier end of your ginger
beer port. That is the beauty standard, which is easy
(26:14):
to achieve.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Delicious and easy to achieve.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I drink too, finding the beauty and everyone and not
making people do foolish things to stop being themselves and
become something else in the interest of pleasing somebody else's gaze.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Right, going so far as to ingest.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
A, don't danguer your.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Health to look good to other people.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Listen. You can be as close to the perfect level
of beauty standard as you want, but if you're sick
to get there, or if you don't feel good about
any of it, it's not worth it. I promise. I
am very grateful that you have all hung out and
listened to us and listened to me yammer on about
my absent feelings.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
And stayed through the disgusting episode out of tamwork.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
We needed some fun talk to shake off all of
that holding milk up to your orifices discussion I'm not
interested in, but we are so grateful that you spent
this time with us, and we will be right back
here again next week with another story of snake oil,
which hopefully will involve less anous talk and another drink
(27:21):
that definitely won't if I have anything to say about it.
Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(27:41):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership
with iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Urban legend originating from the mid nineteen fifties would have
you think. Opera singer Maria Kallis lost sixty five pounds
on the tapeworm diet, a diet where she allegedly swallowed
a parasite packed pill to consume calories for her Now
that's been debunked. It's confirmed by her biography and personal
(00:34):
communications that though she was diagnosed with a beef tapeworm,
it was due to eating raw meat and wasn't something
she did on purpose. But it probably goes without saying, though,
that humans have done some very strange things in the
name of beauty and fashion over the centuries. The tapeworm
diet was and unfortunately still is a real thing, and
(00:56):
it was once a super popular attempt at weight loss.
So let's talk tapeworms. Perhaps one of our grossest episodes yet,
Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And I'm Holly Frye. So getting yourself a parasitic buddy
will help you lose weight, But please, for the love
of all that's holy, don't do it. The idea here
is that the tapeworm lives in your intestines and basically
eats whatever you're eating, meaning you can go for seconds
and thirds without feeling guilty about any of the calories
(01:30):
is you're not absorbing them. That doesn't sound so bad
right until you get to the tapeworm part. That is,
tapeworm should not be inside your body period. They can
get in there by accident, though, and that can happen if,
for instance, you consume raw or undercooked meat that includes beef, pork,
or fish, or if you drink contaminated water. You could
(01:53):
also become infected after handling food, water, or objects that
have been contaminated with feces. Close physical contact with your dog,
such as allowing them to lick your face, is also
a risk for developing a tapeworm infection. However, if you
lived in London between roughly eighteen thirty and nineteen hundred,
(02:14):
there's a good chance you might have intentionally swallowed a
tapeworm for weight loss.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
The fad would also hit the United States, but not
until a bit later in the early nineteen hundreds. We
should note, though, that while we'll be talking about the
Victorian tapeworm diet. Tyra Banks talked about the diet on
her show back in two thousand and nine. Courtney Kardashian
joked about wanting a tapeworm as recently as twenty fifteen,
and in twenty thirteen, a woman from Iowa consumed tapeworm
(02:45):
pills for weight loss, which resulted in an official warning
from the Iowa State Department of Public Health. This is
one of those things that just hasn't gone.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Away, and that's maybe because the tapeworm diet sounds pretty easy.
All you needed was a little pill that was in
victorian times advertised with claims like easily swallowed, sanitized and
jar packed. One popular ad read Eat Eat, Eat, and
all was stay thin, no diet, no baths, no exercise,
(03:18):
no danger, guaranteed harmless fat. The enemy that is shortening
your life banished. How with sanitized tapeworms jar packed friends
for a fair form, easy to swallow, no ill effects,
prepared by wt Bridge chemist, New York, send no money,
(03:38):
particulars mailed free. To be clear, nothing about tapeworms is sanitary,
but product labels surely did proudly claim that their pills
were safe.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
How did this even become a thing? You might be
wondering these standards are problematic now, but in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, ideas about feminine beauty included pale skin,
rosy cheeks, red lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. Women
were also expected to be wafishly thin. A sixteen inch waist,
(04:12):
yes sixteen was ideal by some standards, and women also
needed to be graceful and polite, according to a series
of essays on the subject at the time, quote politeness
may be defined as a dexterous management of our words
and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion
of us and themselves.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
One of the most popular beauty guides of the era,
an unfortunate book called The Ugly Girl Papers, written by
SD Powers and published in eighteen seventy four, was a
sort of self help guide for the quote unquote ugly
women in society, with tips on how to become more beautiful,
and even stated that quote it is a woman's business
(04:55):
to be beautiful. Beauty takes time and effort, the book
bok explained, and if you wanted to find a husband,
you needed to put in the time. This body shaming
guide had the gall to recommend women find a quote
healthy balance in the pursuit of beauty, all while explaining
how to maintain one's figure or how to drop a
(05:16):
few pounds to be more attractive to others. The author claimed,
quote if stout, a girl should eat as little as
will satisfy her appetite, never allowing herself, however, to rise
from the table hungry enter the tapeworm.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But before we meet this parasite, we're going to take
a break forward from our sponsors. When we're back, we
will talk about the unreasonable standard of beauty women were
held to in the Victorian era and how women were
perceived if they did not fit that mold.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
We come back to criminalia. Let's start talking about tuberculosis
and how it ties in to the tapeworm diet.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So during this time, ideal feminine beauty was based on
the appearance of people who had tuberculosis, which was romanticized
during the era. For those characteristics we mentioned earlier, a
pale complexion, dilated pupils, and a frail thin physique. Tuberculosis
had reached epidemic levels in Europe and in the United
States by the mid nineteenth century. The disease targets the
(06:32):
lungs and also damages other organs, and before antibiotics were available,
if you had it, it meant a slow death march.
You died from what was then called consumption. During that time,
consumption was believed to be caused by a hereditary susceptibility
to it, as well as from unhealthy or so called
bad air known as miasmas. It wasn't known to be infectious.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Published in nineteen oh nine, the book Tuberculosis, a treatise
by American authors on its etiology, pathology, frequency, semiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention,
and treatment, outlines the illness this way quote, A considerable
number of patients have and have had for years, a delicate,
(07:18):
transparent skin, as well as fine silky hair. Those sparkling
or dilated eyes and rosy cheeks and lips that were
longed for were common in tuberculosis patients because their common
characteristics of an ongoing low grade fever, but that wasn't
known to the medical community at the time.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Desperate to achieve the coveted look, some Victorian women snacked
on wafers made of arsenic to give themselves that bright
eyed look as well as help them achieve a translucent complexion.
Eyedrops of belladonna were used to dilate pupils, which also
made eyes look bigger. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade,
can also cause blood kindness. Please don't try any of
(08:02):
this at home, and as we keep going, none of
it gets any healthier.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
This unrealistic image society set for women to live up to,
also used a woman's weight as a barometer of her intelligence,
her character, her sexuality, and even her sanity. In Victorian society,
excess weight was attributed to a woman's quote indolence of mind.
Go ahead and embrace yourself, because the body shaming only
(08:29):
gets worse from here. A nineteen hundred edition of The
Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette reported quote obesity always carries with
it physical and often mental weakness. In his eighteen ninety
seven book The Female Offender, author Cizar Lambroso, who was,
among other things, a eugenicist, claimed a connection between obesity
(08:51):
and sex work, stating quote, this greater weight among prostitutes
is confirmed by the notorious fact of the obesity of
those who grow old in their vile trade and who
gradually become positive monsters of adipose tissue. Taking another leap,
he goes on to conclude that quote female lunatics are
(09:12):
far more often exaggeratedly fat than men.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
A so called consumptive chic to cover the fashion world
of the mid eighteen hundreds, as women sought to avoid
being associated with all of that negative perception of carrying
any weight at all. To look as thin as possible
and achieve that ideal sixteen inch waist, women wore pointed
corsets and generous skirts to call attention to tiny waists,
(09:40):
and under those voluminous skirts, women appeared to glide as
they moved, adding an otherworldly dimension to their delicate comportment.
Women also attempted to mimic the consumptive ethereal appearance by
using white powder on their skin and by washing their
skin with arsenic yes. Again, the poison.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Tuberculosis chic was hot. Take for instance, Marie Duplessi, a
French Cortisan and Parisian celebrity. Today we would think of
someone like her as an influencer. She was a striking
Victorian beauty whose well known portrait by artist Edouar Vienna
shows off her shiny black hair. Framing her oval face.
(10:22):
Her eyes are sparkling, and she has pale ivory skin.
Duplessi got that sought after look because she was afflicted
with tuberculosis and she died from it at the age
of twenty three. To achieve that kind of beauty, women
bathed in ammonia and they wore body crushing corsets. And
some women chose more drastic measures, and that is ingesting
(10:45):
tapeworms by swallowing tapeworm pills. Those pills contained beef tapeworm larvae.
These larvae cysts would then hatch inside the body and
voila weight loss was now in progress.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
According to food historian Anny Gray Quote, during the nineteenth century,
dieting became big business. Advertising was becoming more and more sophisticated,
with more and more diet products being pedled. So let's
talk how these tapeworms fit in to consumptive chek.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
So, tapeworms, as we've been saying, are parasites. They're members
of the phylum Anelda, also known as segmented worms, and
that's a species that also includes pinworms and leeches. Segmented
worms can break off segments of their body and as
long as the head remains attached to its host, the
creature can regrow more segments. Tapeworms have three main parts.
(11:42):
The head, which is the part that attaches to intestines
and ingests nutrients from your body, the neck, which can
regenerate its body. And then there's the rest of the worm,
which consists of many segments that bear eggs. When those
eggs hatch, they detach from the rest of the tapeworm
and travel through the bloodstream to your muscles and to
(12:02):
your brain, liver, and other organs, where they develop into cysts.
If treatment to get rid of a tapeworm does not
eliminate the head and neck, it may as well be
useless because the entire worm can regrow.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Tapeworms generally don't cause more than minor symptoms, including things
like lack of appetite, diarrhea, nausea, weight loss of course,
and a craving for salty foods. But if those cysts
grow in the spine or brain rather than the intestine,
side effects could cause life threatening problems, including seizures, nerve pain,
(12:38):
muscle weakness, and cognitive changes. If the central nervous system
becomes infected, a person might experience hydrocephalous meningitis, and damage
to blood vessels in the brainstem or nerves. In some cases,
if the tapeworm grows long enough, it could lead to
obstruction of the bowel appendix or bialduct, which is a
medical emergency. And on ava ridge, an adult tapeworm is
(13:02):
about fifteen to thirty feet long. I mean, can you
imagine in you're intestine on purpose, and they weren't temporary guests.
You could host one for up to a decade. As
long as your symptoms were mild, you might not even notice.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So with all of that delicious imagery and mind, we're
going to take a break for a word from our sponsors,
and when we're back, we will talk about how one
might remove a tapeworm before anti parasitic drugs. It was
not especially easy.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about ways
tapeworms were removed before modern medicine. But first let's talk
about how maybe not a lot of those pills worked
as advertised anyway.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
When it comes down to both Victorian and modern dieters,
because that tapeworm diet just won't go away. Stories about
the effectiveness of this horrifying diet are actually kind of murky.
Modern historians disagree on whether people actually ingested any real
tapeworms from those pills, or whether the advertised products were
(14:20):
just simply placebos. Luckily, most of those tapeworm pills probably
didn't work because most of them were probably inactive, or
they just didn't even contain the active ingredient, which is
a funny thing to call a tapeworm at all. One example,
a product called Neutroids, marketed in the nineteen hundreds is
(14:40):
a weight loss supplement sold by doctor R. Lincoln Graham
of the Gram Sanatorium in New York City, contained ie
at all, magnesium carbonate, starch, talc, and a trace of iron.
But you'll notice that ingredients list contains absolutely no mention
of tapeworms.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
But for those who were actually infected, there's still one
thing we haven't talked about. Removing your tapeworm buckle up
because some of these will probably make you squirm. The
worm could theoretically leave your body on its own during
a bowel movement. Segments of a tapeworm can break off
and exit the body in your stool, and you would
(15:20):
be able to see them. Pieces of tapeworm in your
stool usually look flat and rectangular. They would be white
or a pale yellow, and they'd be the size of
a grain of rice, although sometimes they remain joined together
in a long chain of segments.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Today, if you find yourself in the unfortunate scenario where
you have a tapeworm, your doctor would prescribe what are
known as anthelmentic drugs, which treat parasitic infections. But before
the mid twentieth century, when the first modern anti parasitic
drugs hit the market, worms were treated in a few ways.
Purgative plants such as wormwood were used to both kill
(15:59):
the wor you were hosting and trigger your body to
expel it with about of rather severe diarrhea.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Another popular method of removing your tapeworm involved holding a
glass of milk at your mouth or near your anus,
and then waiting for the worm to come out. Theoretically,
it would head for that milk. Now, there is no
proof that milk can coax or remove a parasite, but
when it comes to folk remedies, it can be hard
to shake. And then there's this method. Terry Deary, in
(16:33):
his book Horrible Histories Vile Victorians, describes a method invented
by a doctor Myers of Sheffield, England, in which cylinders
stuffed with food were inserted into a person's digestive tract.
Patients were then instructed not to eat for a few days,
so that the tapeworms looking for a meal would theoretically
(16:54):
be lured into those traps. Tapeworms would then be coaxed
out of the body with the aforementioned milk method, and
while a glass of milk wasn't really going to help,
at least it was a fairly benign treatment in comparison,
some people choked to death on these cylinders.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was
a better understanding of tuberculosis when in eighteen eighty two,
Robert Coch announced that he discovered the bacteria that causes
the disease. In eighteen sixty one, Louis Pasteur had introduced
germ theory, a breakthrough that proved microscopic organisms invisible germs
(17:32):
were a cause of infection rather than something like bad air.
Building on that, Koch's understanding of tuberculosis helped germ theory
gain more legitimacy, and it also convinced both public health
experts and physicians that tuberculosis was a contagious disease.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
For those desperate to lose weight, whatever their motivation to
do so, tapeworms maybe sounded more appealing or potentially quicker
than things like changing your diet and exercise habits. The
United States Food and Drug Administration officially banned tapeworm pills,
but there's no ban on the unrealistic expectations of female
(18:12):
beauty then or now, I think we need to drink
to make this just wash away from.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I think so tia. But this comes with a bit
of a secondary history lesson. Are you ready, let's do it.
We mentioned one of the treatments was to consume wormwood. Yes,
and I can't let a mention of wormwood go by
and not talk about absence. Of course. So wormwood's scientific
name is Artemisia absyntheum. That's where absinthe gets its name.
(18:49):
It's an ornamental plant. It's native to Europe, although now
you can find it in other places. It has been
used medicinally since all the way back to ancient Egypt.
It was in the ebers Pyrus. It's also mentioned in
the Bible. Pliny the Elder talked about it Juliette's wet
nurse in Shakespeare's play speaks of weaning Juliet by putting
wormwood on her person because the bitter taste made nursing unappealing.
(19:14):
But it didn't become an alcohol until the seventeen hundreds,
when Pierre Ordinaire, who was a French doctor, is credited
with coming up with the first absinthe recipe in his
book The Complete Body of Distilling. That was in seventeen
thirty one, and it was still more than sixty years
before absinthe was bottled as a commercial product, which was
done by Henri Luis Perennaut, and once it was commercially available,
(19:38):
it was a huge hit, so much so that cocktail
hour in Paris got renamed le'overt which is the green hour.
And then absence spread from beyond France to the rest
of Europe and then eventually to the US, and people
really loved it, then they didn't, or some people loved
it and some people did not. A lot of people
(19:58):
got a legen addicted to it, and by the late
nineteenth century it was really easy to find editorials talking
about the dangers of absinthe and how it was fundamentally
evil and how it was going to ruin everybody. That
wave of anti absent thinking was helped by doctors who
had started to attribute a lot of issues to absinthe,
(20:19):
including various mental illnesses which were all grouped under the
nebulous umbrella of insanity, which made me think also of
how some doctors who were horrible made strange and unscientific
associations between carrying extra weight and being insane or whatnot.
And eventually they believed that they had isolated the specific
(20:40):
problem ingredient, which was wormwood in absinthe, which of course
contains a compound called thujone. Thujone is toxic, to be clear,
but the assessment of absent that the dawn of the
twentieth century wasn't accurate in terms of that theu jone
being dangerous, because there were actually studies that started to
come out talking about thu jon dangers and what it
(21:01):
could do to you. That's kind of why it was medicinal.
It had enough toxicity that you could use it to
do things like kill a tape.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Or kill a tape worm exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
And as the medical community and scientists started publishing papers,
absence started getting banned. Belgium was the first to ban
it in nineteen oh five, and then just ten years later,
by nineteen fifteen, almost I think every European country except
Spain had banned it. The US had also banned it,
and it stayed banned for a long time.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
It's interesting because that overlaps our time frame here with
killing tape worms with wormwood.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, exactly. It really wasn't like until eighty years after
it that people started looking at absinthe again and being like, wait,
what wasn't it that was so bad and really kind
of start to do analysis on whether it had actually
been toxic, And when those analyzes were performed, it really
became clear that the theu jone in absinthe really was
(22:04):
just adding a little bit of bitter flavor and sometimes
part of that green coloration we associate with it, but
there was nowhere near enough in it to be toxic.
So that idea that the wormwood in absinthe was what
made it dangerous was completely unfounded. All of those problems
that had been attributed to thujone and to absyinthe, it
(22:25):
was really just run of the mill alcoholism in a
lot of cases, and it was like the novel alcohol,
so that's why people were choosing it, and in some
cases I suspect there were also instances where people actually
did have some form of mental illness that they were
self medicating through heavy drinking because there was no one
recognizing what the real problem was to treat.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Them, and no real treatment at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Yeah, there was nothing to do, so like absinthe and
wormwood kind of got this bad rap for no actual
factual reason. By the way, that whole absinth causing hallucinations
thing is debunked left and right. It's kind of one
of those two sided coins. Both the people that were
into absinthe and the people that thought it was evil
were kind of both perpetuating that myth because people that
(23:14):
were really into it were like, it was amazing, it
was mind altering, it was the best thing I've ever had,
And people that thought it was evil were like, it
will mess up your mind. It's gonna make you like
they were saying the same thing but with different emphasis.
So as all of this scientific information started to become
a parent, slowly those bands started to roll back. There
(23:35):
are specific limits just in case on how much wormwood
can be included in production of absinth, but you can
buy it pretty readily almost anywhere. Now this has been
your absent advocacy minute, and now we're going to drink
some all right.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I like a little history lesson with my drink.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
This is a drink that I'm calling beauty standards, and
it is a really easy one because you make it
in the glass. It shares some DNA with a mule.
There are times when you do not want to directly
pour your alcohol and your mixing ingredients over ice, because
the ice starts to melt very quickly and dilute. In
(24:18):
the case of absinthe, I think it's fine you would
normally if you order an absinth in a bar, they're
gonna dilute it with water anyway. That's what that whole
sugar cube drop thing is going on when you get one.
So you're gonna put your ice, a good amount of
ice in your glass or your cup, whatever you're using.
You're gonna pour in an ounce of absinthe, a half
ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce of violet syrup,
(24:41):
and then you're gonna top that with two to four
ounces of ginger beer and just give it a stir.
The violet syrup and the absinthe. It's like drinking the
most beautiful bouquet in the world. Like all of the
herbaceous flavors of absinthe really come out, and the violet
it softens the edges of everything. It's so yummy and delicious.
(25:03):
I would like one right now.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
That's in a great list of ingredients that sounds like
a yummy drink.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Violet syrup is one of those things. If you don't
have it, I recommend getting some. You can make it.
It's a little bit tricky, so I recommend buying that one,
or at least I find it tricky. Somebody else would
be like what, it's easy, and every time I recommend
ordering some because it's just one of those syrups that's
like it adds to your bar cart or your backbar,
(25:28):
whatever you're using, like just this little like secret weapon
that you can use to make drinks feel a little elevated.
And if when you use it in lieu of simple syrup,
you can also throw it on, you know, a scone
or a cookie and it's I love violet syrup and everything.
The mocktail for this one is so easy. You're going
to do the exact same thing, but instead of using
any absynthe you will use like a half ounce instead
(25:51):
of an ounce of an anis or a licorice syrup.
That's it. Bump it down because at that point that
liquorice flavor gets really intense at a full ounce, so
you don't need that much, especially because you then have
two syrups going on. So I would in that case
probably also lean towards the heavier end of your ginger
beer port. That is the beauty standard, which is easy
(26:14):
to achieve.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Delicious and easy to achieve.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I drink too, finding the beauty and everyone and not
making people do foolish things to stop being themselves and
become something else in the interest of pleasing somebody else's gaze.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Right, going so far as to ingest.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
A, don't danguer your.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Health to look good to other people.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Listen. You can be as close to the perfect level
of beauty standard as you want, but if you're sick
to get there, or if you don't feel good about
any of it, it's not worth it. I promise. I
am very grateful that you have all hung out and
listened to us and listened to me yammer on about
my absent feelings.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
And stayed through the disgusting episode out of tamwork.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
We needed some fun talk to shake off all of
that holding milk up to your orifices discussion I'm not
interested in, but we are so grateful that you spent
this time with us, and we will be right back
here again next week with another story of snake oil,
which hopefully will involve less anous talk and another drink
(27:21):
that definitely won't if I have anything to say about it.
Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(27:41):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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