Decidedly Grim

Today’s Ragged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least 100,000 strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer numbers. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London’s streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

Culled from: The Ghost Map

Facts

Today’s Excrutiating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Where sheer physical brutality was concerned, there was little in Victorian society that rivaled the professional medical act of surgery. Lacking any form of anesthesia beyond opium or alcohol – both of which could only be applied in moderation, given their side effects – surgical procedures were functionality indistinguishable from the most grievous forms of torture. Surgeons prided themselves on their speed above all else, since extended procedures were unbearable for both doctor and patient. Procedures that would now take hours to complete were executed in three minutes or less, to minimize the agony. One surgeon boasted that he could “amputate a shoulder in the time it took to take a pinch of snuff.”

In 1811, the British author Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in Paris. She described the experience in a letter to her sister a year later. After drinking a wine cordial as her sole form of painkiller, she settled into the ominous closet that had been assembled by the team of seven doctors in her home, lined with compresses and bandages and gruesome surgical tools. She lay down on the makeshift bed, and the doctors covered her face with a light handkerchief. “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves, I needed no injunction not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! So excruciating was the agony… I then felt the knife tackling against the breastbone, scraping it! This performed, while I remained in utterly speechless torture.” Before passing out in near shock after the procedure, she caught a glimpse of her primary doctor – “pale nearly as myself, his face streaked with blood and its expression depicting grief, apprehension, and almost horror.”

Culled from: The Ghost Map

Facts