5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (14 page)

141

Twel12

ve Milestones

in Oral Hygiene

350 b.c.: Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” recommends a toothpaste made of three mice and the head of a hare.

50 b.c.: Romans relieve toothache by tying toads to their jaws and make toothpastes and mouthwashes from urine; apparently the very best piss was Portuguese.

a.d. 50: The Greek scholar Pliny advises that toothache can be avoided by eating two mice a month and recommends

“pervasive green frogs, burnt heel of ox, toads and worms” as a cure for halitosis.

1590:

Elizabethans relieve toothache by applying sweat from the anus of a cat that had been chased across a plowed field. Queen Elizabeth I loses the last of her teeth and fills the holes in her mouth with cloth to improve her appearance in public, but somehow remains a virgin.

1768:

A novel method of tooth extraction is perfected by Dr.

Messenger Monsey, resident physician to the Chelsea Royal Hospital, London. He takes a strong piece of catgut, winds one end around his tooth, threads the other end through a specially prepared bullet with a hole drilled through it, loads the bullet into his revolver, and fires. Monsey complains that he finds it difficult to persuade his friends and patients to follow his example.

1770:

A London dentist, Martin Van Butchell, promises

“gums, sockets and palate formed, fitted, finished and fixed without drawing stumps or causing pain,” a bold
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[Twelve Milestones in Oral Hygiene]

claim given that he is working in the pre-anesthetic age. His technique amounts to hitting a prospective patient over the head with a large stick, or blowing a trumpet in his ear seconds before a tooth is to be pulled.

1780:

While spending time in a debtor’s prison in London, an Englishman named William Addis carves a handle out of a cow’s thighbone, bores holes into it, and attaches bristles of cow hair, creating an exciting new dental accessory, the toothbrush.

1865:

Tons of teeth from the Civil War dead are shipped to England to be worn by the rich and the fashionable and to satisfy a craze for tooth transplants—a surgical procedure first performed by John Hunter in the 1750s. Although highly dangerous, the practice, which encourages poor people to sell their own perfectly good teeth, continues until shortly before World War I.

1880:

Cheap celluloid dentures are invented by an English dentist who dislikes handling the teeth of dead men.

They are briefly popular but never really catch on, as they are highly flammable and prone to spontaneous combustion if the user smoked.

1884:

The first use of anesthesia by nitrous oxide—

“laughing gas”—is made by Horace Wells, a young dentist living in Connecticut. Wells didn’t live long enough to enjoy the full rewards of his marvelous
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discovery. The medical profession laughed, and Wells, haunted by ridicule, began sniffing chloroform. One day, in a chloroform-induced delirium, he ran into the street and doused two passing prostitutes with acid.

Wells killed himself before his case came to trial; he smuggled a can of chloroform into his cell, opened a main artery, and bled painlessly to death.

1938:

Chinese boar hairs, the favored material for toothbrush bristles, are replaced by nylon, which is considered a more hygienic substitute. Boar-hair bristles, although subject to bacterial growth, still account for 10 percent of toothbrush sales worldwide.

1995:

Following the death of one of his patients, Stephen Cobble, a dentist from Tennessee, is charged with professional incompetence. Former patients complain that he has given them checkups by having his assistant rub their backs, stomachs, and arms; sedated them by administering injections to their groins and navels; transferred scar tissue from a cesarean section to treat a jaw disorder, made a patient stand with one foot on a stack of magazines, and prescribed a diet of beef, salt, eggs, and a quarter pound of butter daily.

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Ten Grea 10

t Sporting Moments

a.d. 165: The Greek athlete Peregrinus set himself on fire during the Olympic Games to prove his faith in reincarnation. He hasn’t reappeared at any subsequent Olympic meetings, although he did enjoy a small cult and his staff came to be regarded as a religious relic.

a.d. 850: The size of a regulation soccer ball, roughly the same as a man’s head, is arrived at by design: English soldiers enjoy kicking around the head of a dead Danish brigand.

1649:

The first grandstands are built around Tyburn Tree in London so that crowds of up to 100,000 can watch public hangings.

1862:

During interludes in the Civil War, both armies pass the time by staging louse races.

1925:

Frank Hayes becomes the first deceased person to win a steeplechase. Hayes rides a 20–1 outsider, Sweet Kiss, to victory at Belmont Park, but when the horse’s owner and trainer go to congratulate him, they find him firmly attached to the saddle but slumped forward. Doctors confirm that a fatal heart attack made him an ex-jockey before he crossed the finish line.

1956:

Chairman Mao’s Physical Culture and Sports Commission recognizes a new track-and-field event, the hand-grenade throw.

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[Ten Great Sporting Moments]

1976:

At the Montreal Olympics, Princess Anne, a member of Great Britain’s equestrian team, becomes the only female competitor allowed to forgo a routine sex test.

1978:

Sports newscaster Phil Rizzuto, in the middle of his commentary during a baseball game, is informed of the sudden death of Pope Paul VI. “Well now,”

Rizzuto tells millions of baseball fans, “that kind of puts a damper on even a Yankee win.”

1994:

Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar is gunned down by an irate wine waiter after scoring a goal against his own team—a mistake that helped eliminate his country from the World Cup

tournament.

1996:

At Thailand’s national pre-Olympic trials, the men’s volleyball gold medal is won by a team of transsexuals from northern Lampang Province. To the great disappointment of the players, who have breasts but have yet to undergo genital surgery, none of them are selected for the Olympic team.

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10

’Rhoid Rage:

Ten Hemorrhoid Sufferers

Socrates

Emperor Nero

Alexander the Great

Martin Luther

Lewis Carroll

Charles Dickens

Edgar Allan Poe

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Queen Victoria

Marilyn Monroe

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Ten 10

Cures No Longer

Recommended by the

Medical Profession

1

The Roman physician Pliny the Elder taught that human urine was an excellent remedy for dandruff, running sores, venereal disease, and mad-dog and snake bites.

2

In the Middle Ages, it was fashionable to eat, and to rub into the body, parts of ancient Egyptian mummies for medicinal purposes. The body parts of decomposing Egyptians were widely touted as a cure for abscesses, fractures, contusions, paralysis, migraine, epilepsy, sore throats, nausea, disorders of the liver and spleen, and internal ulcers. Mummy trafficking became a lucrative and highly organized business, starting in Egyptian tombs and following a well-planned route to Europe. The bottom finally fell out of the mummy market in the late seventeenth century, when people found out that dealers were selling “fake” mummy made from recently murdered slaves.

3

The most popular cure for leprosy in the Middle Ages was bathing in the blood of a dog. If a dog wasn’t available, a two-year-old child’s blood would do.

4

In the sixteenth century, most learned people were convinced of the magical medical properties of Bezoar stones—hard secretions often formed in cows’ stomachs or goats’ gallbladders. The groundbreaking French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré offended many people, especially the French king, Charles IX, who was a big Bezoar fan, when he suggested that the stones were completely useless. Paré decided to set up an experiment to prove his point. A cook who had been convicted of
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[Ten Cures No Longer Recommended]

theft and sentenced to public strangulation was offered a choice between receiving his sentence, and swallowing a lethal poison along with a Bezoar stone, thought to be the perfect antidote. He chose the latter and died. King Charles concluded from this experiment that the cook’s Bezoar stone had been a fake.

5

The seventeenth-century German surgeon Wilhelm Hilden advised the use of postoperative balm made from powdered mummy, earthworms, iron oxide, pig brains, and moss from the skull of a man who had been hanged under the sign of Venus. The truly innovative part of Hilden’s prescription was that this mixture was to be applied not to the wound, but to the knife that caused it.

6

Early suggested cures for syphilis included having intercourse with a virgin, rubbing dung into the male organ, and bathing in horse urine. The only regular precaution taken to avoid venereal disease in Elizabethan times was to wash the genitals in vinegar. Eighteenth-century cures for venereal disease included a sound thrashing and having the penis wrapped in the warm parts of a freshly dismembered fowl.

7

Until the sixteenth century, when the French surgeon Ambroise Paré proved it unnecessary, the standard cure for male hernias was castration.

8

Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, ate about 180 pounds of soap over a period of several years in an attempt to get rid of a stone in his bladder.

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9

The wealthy nineteenth-century politician and country squire Jack Mytton of Halston, Shropshire, died at age thirty-eight after sustaining injuries from setting fire to his own nightshirt in an attempt to cure his hiccups.

Before the horribly burned Mytton expired, he remarked,

“Well, the hiccups is gone, by God.”

10

The nineteenth-century New York physician Dr. Thomas Spencer attempted to cure cholera by plugging the patient’s anus with sealing wax.

150

Ten

10

Celebrity Fashion

and Beauty Tips

1

Chairman Mao’s gray military-style “Mao suit,”

previously known as the Sun Yat-sen suit and later worn by millions, made its first appearance in 1949. Mao’s chief of protocol, Yu Yinqing, suggested that in the future he stick to the more conventional dark suit when he was receiving foreign dignitaries. Yu’s fashion tip went unheeded; he was fired and later committed suicide.

2

On the day of his execution, King Charles I wore two undershirts. It was very cold and he didn’t want anyone to see him shivering.

3

When the wardrobe of Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, was inventoried in 1809, she was found to own 666 winter dresses and 230 summer dresses but only two pairs of underpants.

4

Few in the diplomatic corps have served with as much distinction as Queen Anne’s cousin, Lord Cornbury, the third Earl of Clarendon, who was the governor-general of New York and New Jersey from 1701 to 1708. The veteran British parliamentarian, a burly transvestite in his spare time, opened the New York Assembly wearing satin shoes, a blue silk ball gown studded with diamonds, and a fancy headdress. When Queen Anne’s American subjects complained about their governor’s dress, Cornbury dismissed the locals as “stupid.” It was perfectly obvious, he said, that as a representative of Her Majesty he had a duty to represent her as accurately as he could. Queen Anne had him recalled.

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5

In an attempt to make himself more attractive to his girlfriend Gala, Salvador Dalí shaved his armpits until they bled and wore a perfume made of fish glue and cow dung.

6

When syphilis robbed the great sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe of his nose, he had an attractive artificial nose made of gold and silver.

7

The famous French racing driver Jean Behra wore a plastic right ear after losing the original in a racing crash in 1955. He always carried a spare in his pocket just in case.

8

George Washington had at least four sets of false teeth, which he soaked in port overnight to make them taste better. By the time he became president he had only one tooth left and used a set of dentures fashioned from cow’s teeth. Washington later contacted a leading dentist in Philadelphia, who produced a state-of-the-art set carved not from wood, but from hippopotamus tusk. The new dentures were thoughtfully drilled with a hole to fit over Washington’s remaining tooth: Unfortunately they were a very bad fit and the cause of constant pain, which the president tried to ease by taking laudanum. Washington is noted for not smiling very much for his portraits.

9

The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was never seen without his high, heavy black riding boots, even on the most inappropriate occasions and uncomfortable conditions. He once had one of his bodyguards sent to the salt mines for
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not wearing boots. It turned out that the bodyguard had taken to wearing slippers so as not to wake Stalin when he was sleeping. Stalin had him arrested for plotting to assassinate him. A guest once asked Stalin why he never took his boots off even on a stifling hot day. The Russian leader replied, “Because you can kick someone in the head with them so hard he’ll never find all his teeth.”

10

Mae West wore eight-inch platform shoes and false nipples.

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