Life in past centuries was miserable and filthy for most of humanity. Few people got to live in a castle, and most people were undernourished and plagued by disease. England in the 1700s was more prosperous than most of the world, but life was still drab, poor, and filthy compared to today. English people did things like drinking their own urine as a folk remedy, or using cat’s dung in cosmetics:
In the 18th century, people seldom traveled and lived in hyperlocal worlds. Weights and measures still varied from one region to another. . . . Cornish was still spoken in parts of the far southwest until about 1780, and Welsh and Gaelic were still in common use in areas outside England. Most residents of the Isle of Man spoke their own language, Manx, as well….
Childhood ailments claimed a large number of children before their fifth birthdays (60 percent in London in 1764), and those illnesses that failed to kill often scarred or attracted treatments that were even worse….Children…had hare’s brains smeared on their gums while teething, and were given enemas for worms. A particularly drastic worm remedy involved inserting a piece of pork on a string into the rectum and drawing it out slowly to lure the worms. Some diseases could be cured, it was thought, by a sudden fright, such as riding on a bear, having a gun fired nearby, or ‘giving the patient a part of some disgraceful animal, as a mouse, etc., to eat.’”…
In those days, sometimes avoiding doctors altogether was better than receiving what passed for medical treatment….doctors resorted to visible but useless or even harmful measures-bleeding, dosing with dangerous drugs, raising blisters on the skin, and inducing vomiting….Folk remedies were also usually useless and often dangerous. “They ate soap for stomach troubles, touched hanged men to cure goiter and swollen glands, drank asses’ milk, made charms of babies’ amniotic sacs, drank their own urine for ague or snail tea for a sore chest, rubbed their eyes with black cats’ tails for styes, and ate eye of pike for toothaches, pigeon blood for apoplexy, tortoise blood for epilepsy, cockroach tea for kidney ailments, puppy and owl broth for bronchitis, and spiders for fever.”
Beauty products could be harmful too. “Most cosmetics were made at home” even in the 1700s, with some recipes “containing harmful chemicals like the white lead in face paint or the mercury in some rouges” and others included irritants such as quicklime or even “cat’s dung.” “Some reportedly also wore false eyebrows made of mouse skin that could, in a hot room, begin to slide down an unfortunate woman’s face.” The state of dentistry was similarly dreadful. “If something went wrong with the teeth, dentists hand-drilled cavities as always, with no anesthetic but alcohol and filled the resulting holes with molten tin, lead, or gold….
Standards of sanitation were also unacceptable. London’s streets were “full of sewage and horse dung and butchers’ offal.” “The streets were atrocious in the first half of the [18th] century, full of dust in dry weather and mud in wet. These streams were augmented by dirtied water tossed by maids from the upper stories, by gutters that ran directly onto the streets and pavements, and by rainstorms, which carried into them ‘Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats and turnip tops.’ The streets were dirtied by not only horse manure but also human waste, particularly from beggars and children who urinated and [defecated] next to buildings.
