Brief

Throughout history, people have done all sorts of things to stay young, beautiful, and healthy-- everything from eating crocodile feces to drinking snail water. This nonfiction book takes us through the history of things like makeup and mouthwash, detailing how ancient practices paved the way for modern tips, tricks, treatments, and fads we still see today.

What We Liked

The work is fun, engaging, and informative overall. It’s meticulously researched, and the writers present it in a way that feels consistently approachable. It’s a nice blend of history and witty commentary that makes the material pop, and endears us to its creators on the page.
SNAIL WATER, WHALE VOMIT, & ZOMBIE VIRUSES dives into pieces of history that likely aren’t found anywhere else, least of all in popular culture. Audiences who enjoy anthologies like ‘THE FOOD THAT BUILT AMERICA’ or ‘MODERN MARVELS’ would likely enjoy this. History buffs, academics, or those who simply have a passion for the weird would feel right at home among these anecdotes.

Film: N/A- Nonfiction/Unscripted.

TV: The hook is simple: people like weird stuff, and the history of health and beauty is anything but normal. In anthology form, this feels like it could be an engaging, informative episodic for people who enjoy learning about nuances of the past they aren’t likely to encounter anywhere else.
The manuscript is incredibly well-researched, and the authors are qualified in their telling of these stories. It’d likely fit in well alongside the History Channel’s THE FOOD THAT BUILT AMERICA (or its counterpart, THE MEN WHO BUILT AMERICA), or its more recent CRAZY RICH ANCIENTS. It might even fit in well on a streaming service, in conversation with series like Netflix’s HIGH ON THE HOG.

Key points:
Educational.
Approachable.
Witty.
Meticulously researched.
Episodic.

Synopsis

Throughout history, people have done insane things to try to stay young, beautiful, and healthy. SNAIL WATER, WHALE VOMIT, AND ZOMBIE VIRUSES aims to prove that this history is anything but boring. For instance, makeup started out as bug repellant before it became a beautifier. Invented in ancient Egypt, men, women, and children wore eye makeup to catch the attention of their gods in hopes of ensuring good health. In their makeup were ingredients like zinc, which we still use today. In fact, derivatives of many ancient skin and makeup regimes are still in use today. Ancient Grecians, Chinese, and Japanese folk had a desire for thick eyebrows, so much that they’d glue ox hair onto their brows with tree resin. In Ancient Rome, women would dilate their eyes with belladonna berry juice, a derivative of atropine, an ingredient in the drops we receive from today’s eye doctors. Around the 1600s, people would use leeches to suck their blood and keep their skin pale. Modern doctors have adjusted the practice and use chemicals derived from leech saliva in a host of medicines. A Renaissance woman would put urine on her face to improve the texture of the skin.
And we can thank ancient Sumerians for lip color. The trend took the world by storm, making its way to Greece, where they’d put sheep sweat into their lip color, an ingredient today known as lanolin. For color, they’d use beetle carcasses, today listed as “cochineal extract.”
Alongside a desire for youth and beauty has always been a desire for love. The idea of love potions dates to at least biblical times, but became more popular in medieval Europe. Called ‘sweaty cakes,’ they’d take bits of human sweat and other essences of a person and give them to their beloved to eat. Animal parts like bat’s blood became popular, too. In modern day Bolivia, some people still purchase live bats to drink their blood and receive powerful benefits. Lizards, because of their winter hibernation, were seen as powerful tools for resurrection and rebirth. Today in places like Mali and Nigeria, one can still buy lizard’s blood for use in love potions. For aphrodisiacs, Spanish Fly was popular. In small doses, it could make genitals swell. But too much would cause organ failure. Today, a part of the ingredient is still used in Chinese medicine and dermatology offices as a treatment for a poxvirus. In India, the Datura plant was used in potions. Today, a processed version is used to treat asthma, among other things. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and the Middle East would use Mandrake root, which some herbalists still use in small doses, or a derivative called etoposide, an alkaloid that produces free radicals in the body.
In parts of the ancient world, beer was a way to stay hydrated in the sun. It also accidentally led to the discovery of penicillin. The earliest antibiotic that we know about – tetracycline – was found in the bones of ancient Nubians 2,000 years ago, and in Egyptians over 8,000 years ago. In 1980, researchers from Emory University found traces of tetracycline in human bones and discovered the source to be from the beer they were drinking. In a 2010 study, the University of Pennsylvania began investigating beer residue from clay and metal jars found within the tombs of pharaohs and kings to see if they contained any cancer-fighting properties. During the tests, they found that some ingredients acted like tumor suppressors. And humulones, chemical compounds found in mature hops, is currently being studied by chemists at the University of Washington to see if they can be used to treat diabetes and some cancers. Hops also have anti-anxiety and anti-inflammatory properties. In fact, you can find hops extract in many hair and skin care products today, to fight things like psoriasis, and nail fungus.
Early humans believed that magic, religion, and superstition were the guiding principles to managing illness. They believed in supernatural sicknesses brought on by evil spirits and things like spells. The treatment was always the same: get the evil out through the body, sometimes by trepanation, or drilling a hole in one’s skull, a practice that is today sometimes used to reduce brain bleed. Other practices relied on using magic to heal. Today, one of India’s health systems is Ayurvedic medicine, a 3,000-year-old system based on a balance of mind, body, and spirit. For women, it was believed that all ailments were the result of problems in the womb. Further, they
believed that the womb moved within the body, searching for semen, and causing illness in the process. The cure was fumigating the vagina to lure the womb back into place. During the Middle Ages, the church took over medical jurisdiction, convincing the masses that disease was the result of sin. It was then that magic morphed into prayer. But with the onset of the Crusades, people were introduced to Middle Eastern science and medicine for the first time. Then, in the 1500s, physicians began to learn how epidemics spread, leading to da Vinci’s anatomy drawings and a vast understanding of the human body. By the time we entered the Victorian age, the wandering womb theory was replaced with hysteria, forcing many women into asylums where they were experimented on, the precursor to some of the leading theories we rely on today.
Feminine products have a long and ugly history. For many centuries, menstrual bleeding was considered ‘unclean’ and women were hidden away every month. But the blood was considered magic, and used often in rituals. Until the 1800s, doctors didn’t know why women bled every month. To ease the symptoms of a heavy flow, women often drank wine with cinnamon, substances that today are known to help with things like relaxation and inflammation. As a precursor to what we use today, ancient Egyptians would mix soil with honey and galena and use a stick to push it into the body, where they’d leave it for days. The ancient Greeks and Romans inserted wool, soaked in things like goose fat. Sometimes, women would use fabric from their clothes to catch the flow. The first sanitary napkin was developed in the US in 1896, but many women were embarrassed to purchase it. During WWI, nurses began using cellulose bandages. They wrote the company who made the bandage and soon, Curads by Kotex was created. Tampons, by comparison, were developed around the 19th century, but mostly used as contraception. During the early 20th century, tampons were used to discharge medicine into the body. Still, they were seen as scandalous by the religious communities. Today, some still find the discussion of menstruation taboo.
If we look at some of the ancient practices of fertility and birth, it’s easy to see that there was often a lack of knowledge. As fertility tests, the ancient Egyptians would force a woman to sit on a pile of dirt and rotting beer. Every time she threw up signified her ability to have one child. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates blamed a woman’s weight for her infertility. And if it was deemed a medical problem, Hippocrates suggested sticking a lead probe into the cervix to open it, a precursor treatment to today’s cervical stenosis. In ancient India, if a woman couldn’t get pregnant, she was often kicked out of the family and deemed possessed by a deathly Goddess. In ancient Italy, they would mix urine with bran and wait to see if worms appeared. During the Middle Ages, infertile women were thought to be consorting with the devil. Once a woman was pregnant, some ancient civilizations relied on a uterine amulet to keep a woman’s womb in place. Others would use birthing bricks, the ancient equivalent of giving birth in the squatting position. There were also various ‘tricks’ for speeding up or easing the pain of delivery, like stepping over graves and chanting. When the baby was born, some cultures buried the placenta. In ancient France, they would bathe babies born of noble descent. But in ancient China, they wouldn’t wash mothers or newborn babies in hopes of fending off evil spirits. And in Britain, fathers would bring cheese into the delivery room, and eat it as good luck.
Scientists believe that humans started wearing clothes around 300,000 years ago, to protect genitalia from the elements and things like bugs and animals. A codpiece – the precursor to today’s athletic cup- was one of the first coverings. Sometimes made of gourds, they did more than just protect. Often, they would hold things like money and tobacco. And sometimes, they would hide evidence of syphilis. Today, they merely protect the genitals during contact sports.
All cultures around the world have used body modification, like tattoos, to express status, class, rites of passage, to mark criminals and spiritual awakening. Sometimes, they were even seen as curative, in a practice similar to acupuncture today. Some used instruments they fashioned into “needles” that were made out of whatever was around them, such as cactus spines or wood. For some African tribes practiced, scarification that was their thing. Scarification is when you cut or burn the skin in a design that, when healed, forms raised keloid scars on the skin due to increased
amounts of collagen at the damaged site. Another type of body modification that was very popular in Europe during the 1400s was the tiny waist. Corsets were interspersed with hard materials, like whalebone and horn. During the Victorian era, people started making corset boning out of steel and wood, but it wasn’t until the stronger grommet came about that the tiny waists became even smaller. Women continued to break ribs to have their waists appear thinner until the 1920s, when fashion rules fortunately began to change, and the corset fell out of favor.
Tuberculosis was a common disease in people’s everyday lives during the Victorian era, with 1 in 4 people afflicted. With its ability to make people pale and thin, upper-class Victorians came to romanticize tuberculosis, even idealizing those suffering from it. For the women who never contracted it, they would alter their appearance to look as if they had TB by painting their skin with light layers of zinc oxide, enhancing their veins with blue powder, using beet juice to color their lips, and putting belladonna drops into their eyes. But as knowledge about germs and how they spread became common knowledge, it impacted things like footwear and the lengths of women’s skirts. Corsets also came under attack, since doctors believed they prevented the lungs from expanding and the blood from circulating. Their solution was what they called “health corsets” with elastic and cinching at the waist, making the corset more flexible. Men were told to shave, so germs couldn’t live in their beards. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that people began admiring healthy appearances and tanned skin, rendering the above out of fashion.
Shoes were often considered to be a necessary component of one’s happiness and success in the afterlife. Sometimes people would be mummified wearing linen sandals decorated with beads and other jewelry. They were also used in spiritual practices. If you look at any well-worn pair of shoes, you can see the imprint of the owner’s toes, and long ago the idea that someone could use that imprint as a form of magic was a real concern. It’s called sympathetic magic, where an imitation of a person can be used to cause harm to the actual person. Other than protective footwear, some
people believed that an old shoe could protect your soul or at least your house. A shoe would act like a charm to keep evil at bay, a tradition that has been documented well into the 1930s.
With every new archaeological discovery and with new scientific breakthroughs, we get a better understanding of viruses and bacteria. With the development of vaccines, we have discovered an excellent way of controlling and even eliminating certain ailments. The origins of inoculations are unclear, but some sources say it could be as early as 200 BC. In the pandemics and epidemics of the ancient world, people came up with some unusual ways to deal with the symptoms. Bloodletting and boil-lancing were common, but so were the superstitious practices of burning herbs and bathing in rosewater and vinegar. Religion also played a big part, as they saw the devastation of plagues like the Black Death as a sign from God that they were being punished. Poor sanitation and living conditions have always played a major role in epidemics and pandemics, like with cholera and the Spanish flu. Understanding the evolutionary history of viruses and bacteria is helpful in protecting future generations from epidemics and pandemics. It’s difficult to predict where that evolution will go, but having scientists study previous outbreaks of disease allows us to have an idea of what could happen.
The ancient Babylonians are the first on record to make “soap,” as early as 2800 BC, called Aleppo soap. It hails from the ancient city of Aleppo in Syria’s Levant region, and was made by boiling olive oil, what we now call lye, and water for three days.
Aleppo soap is still made today, only now we add sodium hydroxide to the mixture after it has thickened to create a hard soap. Aleppo’s ingredient list is smart. Laurel oil has been used for thousands of years to treat insect bites and skin conditions, Today, soap makers still believe in this wonder oil. The other oil in Aleppo soap, olive oil, has been used for hundreds of years to heal people’s insides as well as their outsides.
Olive oil is also the main ingredient in Castile soap, produced originally in central Spain. Today Castile soap is made with coconut oil, olive oil, and hemp oil. Vegetable oil has also been a common ingredient in soaps since the time of the ancient Egyptians.
In the late 5th or early 4th century BC, Hippocrates told the people in his book, On Ailment, to use food as medication. In ancient Rome rabies tended to be a problem.
So the physicians would prescribe cutting open the bite and covering it with raw veal and fecal matter. The use of fecal matter to become or remain healthy was common.
People used manure to fertilize the land in order to have plentiful harvests, so it made sense to them that poop would do the same thing for the body when it was sick or unbalanced. In 1670, Hannah Woolley, a widowed servant, decided that people needed to drink healthy as well, and this is possibly where our smoothies and green drinks originated from. In her recipe book, The Queen-Like Closet, Woolley suggests drinking snail water to treat and possibly prevent tuberculosis. Snail water is basically wine/beer that contains crushed snails, mashed earthworms and a lot of medicinal herbs. During this time of medical exploration and experimentation, physicians took on the theory of “like cures like.” Basically, if epilepsy stems from the brain, then use brains to cure it. Although today we may not drink the blood of executed criminals to relieve sickness or just stay healthy, we do use blood to try to stay young and beautiful. Take the Vampire Facial, a great example of modern-day “like cures like” that many celebrities tout as being great for making your skin look young and healthy.
Chewing gum has its roots deep in man’s history – at least 9,000 years ago. At that time, hunter-gatherers in northern Europe chewed on birch bark tar to use as glue when fashioning their weapons and tools. But birch bark wasn’t the only thing used by the ancients to keep their jaws busy. Ancient Greeks chewed on a plant substance called mastica. Modern-day Greeks use mastica in everything from their Greek Easter bread to shampoo. The ancient Egyptians put it in their water to make it taste better.
Sort of like what we do with lemons and cucumbers now. But the most popular substance for gum that has made its way into modern times comes from the ancient Maya. It’s the chicle, and it comes from the bark of the sapodilla tree. But it wasn’t until the late 1840s that spruce tree gum really became commercialized, in the way we know it today.
During the 1700s, it was common for people to try to lose weight by making themselves hot for a long period of time and sweating out the fat. It seems to make sense, and people still do it today with special suits made to induce sweating, wearing sweat belts, and spending time in saunas and hot tubs. Curiously enough, some people swallow tapeworms on purpose. At the turn of the 20th century, the idea of swallowing tapeworm eggs to lose weight was a common method of dieting. You can still buy tapeworm eggs today, even though they are illegal in the United States. In the
1980s, the Breatharian Diet – eating nothing but air -- was all the rage. Although The Breatharian Diet may seem a tad wacky, many people in the world practice a mild version of it in the form of fasting. Intermittent fasting for weight loss popular, and fasting itself is an ancient practice.
Ancient cultures were aware of the symptoms of menopause, and roughly the age of onset (40 years old), but because they were more interested in the health of women who could still bring forth children, menopause didn’t get written about. But in 1710, physicians began to take notice of the fact that the symptoms of menopause were only happening to women – and that concerned them. This led to the terrifying treatments of putting women into asylums and removing their ovaries, which physicians felt were diseased. Physicians at this time didn’t know hormones were
involved until roughly around 1902, when we began to garner the knowledge – and the treatments – that we have today.
We often forget that plastic surgery’s origins paved the way for the brilliant reconstructive surgery, and people were performing it thousands of years ago. For ancient Egyptians, being recognized by the gods after death was vital to acceptance into the afterlife. If you look at the mummy of Ramses II, you will notice that his large, hooked nose is his most prominent facial feature. It was likely that way in life, and after death the embalmers made it so it would still be his greatest feature. The
ancient Romans also performed reconstructive surgery, but they did so on gladiators who had their noses and ears chopped off during the tournament battles. In 600 BC, an ancient Indian surgeon named Sushruta wrote about a method of nasal reconstruction in his text, Sushruta-Samhita, where a mutilated nose was repaired by bridging tissue from the cheek to the nose, or the forehead to the nose. When the first world war began, surgeons were being called upon to put the pieces of the soldiers back together and mold their faces back into recognizable shapes. All of this helped lead to the multi-billion-dollar plastic surgery industry we know today.
People have been using mouthwash for thousands of years, and one of its main ingredients used to be urine. To whiten and brighten, the ancient Egyptians created a toothpaste to remove the plaque and staining that archaeologists say is the oldest toothpaste recipe ever found. The ingredients are simple, with one important one: dried iris flower. Although used for thousands of years for various health and beauty rituals including toothpaste, iris flower has only been used to fight gum disease recently, likely due to its astringent properties. The Romans took the Egyptian recipe a step further by adding charcoal to it – something we still use in some toothpastes; and China and India added flavor to their toothpastes by adding ginseng., also still in use today.
As has so often happened in human history, we sometimes stumble upon things by accident. So many habits, medicines, and treatments we use to today are part of this larger trial and error that people have done throughout the centuries. While we don’t know what will come next, just as we have for thousands of years, we will build upon the knowledge of our ancestors, tweaking it a little, and maybe throwing in a little science for good measure.

About The Author

Melanie Dellas has been an historical researcher for over 30 years, a museum professional for over 15 years, and a writer all her life. Following her passion for historical research and honoring her graduate degree, she co-founded, with Karen Lacy, Muse Curatorial Consulting Group, which provides conservation and preservation for artifact collections, and exhibit curation for museums around the country. Melanie has written three books in her Fantastic, Fabulous Creatures & Beasts series, which gives readers the original folktales of mythological creatures from cultures around the world. She has also co-authored an early reader book with her oldest son titled, Pat-A-Cake, Pat-A-Cake...We Made A Mistake! As a former magazine writer, editor, and publisher, she has won awards for Best Publication, has been published in the San Diego Business Journal’s Top 50 Women Business Owners and, along with Karen, has been named a Woman of Vision by Modern Luxury magazine. Also with Karen, Melanie co-hosts, writes and produces a weird history podcast called The Unusual History of Every Thing, which is the inspiration for this book. Karen Lacy has been a museum professional and curator for over 20 years. She is the co-founder of Muse Curatorial Consulting Group, and an adjunct professor of anthropology at two colleges in San Diego. Karen follows her passion for history as a coordinator for the California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program, a member of the Texas Archaeological Society and the Society for California Archaeology, a board member of the San Diego Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, as well as a peer reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums. Karen also teaches workshops with Melanie and speaks at museum conferences. Since 1999, Karen has participated in annual excavations with various universities and the Texas Archaeological Society, working with volunteers at various experience levels.