Three professions that have disappeared in our time - and this is great

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Those who are now sighing for the good old days, when “women were chaste, the word“honor”was still in use, and all products were environmentally friendly,” just know little about the past. Just some three centuries ago, a child in early childhood could be bought and disfigured in order to profitably resell, a harmless removal of a corn could result in fatal blood poisoning, and after death, a person was often not allowed to really lie down in his own grave.

In those days, in addition to the generally accepted and even relatively honest ways of earning money, there were many professions, the ethical side of which would seem disgusting to us today. About three - in this review.

Body Snatchers

For a long time, posthumous life in England was in complete order, as well as throughout the rest of Europe. It was forbidden to open the corpses - the vessel of God, after all, and the violators were treated harshly and unsanitary. Physicians had to be content with the treatises of the Roman physician Gallen, who opened mainly animals, and made conclusions about the human body by analogy.

But at the very beginning of the 16th century, the Scottish King James IV, by his edict, allowed the corporation of barbers and surgeons to open four bodies of executed criminals within a year. And immediately two problems arose. Firstly, only four corpses for everyone, including students, is negligible, and secondly, at the beginning of the 16th century, hanging was far from the only execution option in England and Scotland. And after some of her methods, the bodies fell on the table, let's say delicately, not quite in a marketable state. In addition, in many sentences, in addition to the actual method of killing, there were also various interesting options for a posthumous punishment like "and put his body in chains for intimidation for a period of a week." It is clear that after the corpse hung in an iron cage for a week, and even birds actively worked on it, there was almost nothing left for the doctors.

In 1540, the same law was passed in England itself. Then, century after century, the quota was gradually increased, but still, several thousand doctors, barbers and artists who joined them, who just wanted to portray a person who looked like a person, and not his shadow on the wall, desperately lacked corpses. In such a situation, a black market simply could not but appear - and it did not hesitate to appear, along with people who made the theft of corpses from cemeteries their profession. In England they received the ironic nickname "resurrectors".

The scale and turnover of the underground corpse market is amazing. The average rate of a fresh dead man ranged from 2.5 to 15 pounds, that is, from 3 to 23 average monthly wages of a male worker (and then they worked 14 hours a day, 6 days a week). But these are prices, so to speak, for "basic equipment", and the corpses of those who died from some unusual disease or were distinguished by curious congenital deformities were much more expensive - up to several hundred pounds.

As soon as the poor English inhabitants did not try to protect their posthumous peace from the "resurrectors" - nothing helped. Those who were richer ordered steel coffins reinforced no worse than any other bank safe, the relatives of those who were poorer tried to delay the funeral until the body began to obviously decompose, watchtowers were set up in cemeteries - and still the corpses were stolen every year thousands. If there is demand, then there will be supply.

By the way, the scheme by which the body snatchers worked is very interesting. As a rule, the cemeteries were “bombed” by a brigade of 6-8 people. All actions were worked out to the smallest detail: an inclined manhole was dug to the end of the coffin, it broke out, after which the body was pulled to the surface with loops and hooks, undressed, everything removed from it was returned, the coffin was nailed down, the manhole was carefully buried to it, the "client" was loaded on a cart and drove off. Why such difficulties? Hello to the English system of law and the ability of the subjects of the crown to manipulate this very system.

The fact is that until the middle of the 19th century in England there was no rule on the right to own one's own body. Therefore, the corpse after death turned out as if "nobody's", in contrast to the linen put on it, the shroud and other good - this is already the property of the relatives of the deceased. If caught, the gang of "resurrectors" could expect, at best, punishment for some kind of "disturbance of public peace" with an extremely short term. But for the theft of personal belongings from the coffin, they could already be judged as thieves. They tried to leave the coffin intact for the same reason - so as not to fall under the law on the desecration of graves.

Similarly, British criminals work today - these guys truly know how to honor the laws of their country. For example, in a robbery and burglary of houses, apartments and shops, first there is one group that breaks windows and doors, but does not penetrate into the room, and after it another group, which already takes things out. And all because for burglary up to 14 years in prison, for simple theft - up to seven, and for damage to private property - only a few months.

The business of "resurrectors" flourished and brought superprofits until 1832, when a law was passed that allowed to open, without any quotas, the dead in prisons or state workhouses found on the street and unclaimed by relatives of the bodies and other "superfluous people". But even after that, the body snatchers did not leave the scene, switching to stealing the corpses of celebrities for ransom. So in 1978 from the cemetery of the Swiss city of Vevey kidnapped the body of Charlie Chaplin and demanded from his widow as much as 200 thousand francs.

Comprachicos

To a person who has not read Hugo's novel "The Man Who Laughs", this word may seem like some funny Latin Americanism like "gangster-banditos". In fact, this was the name of the buyers and kidnappers of children with congenital deformities that operated throughout Europe until the middle of the 18th century. And not only the buyers - when the right human material was not at hand, the comprachicos fabricated freaks out of ordinary children.

People with obvious external grotesque deviations attracted general interest instead of compassion until quite recently - at the beginning of the 20th century, dwarfs and bearded women still performed in the famous Barnum circus. Unusual-looking representatives of indigenous peoples from different parts of the world at the same time were generally shown in zoos along with elephants and zebras. And in the 18th century and earlier, children with disabilities were also a valuable commodity.

Giants, dwarfs, hydrocephalics, twins and the like were bought to the court of kings and aristocrats - as jesters, servants, living toys and witty entertainment for guests. Likewise, they were purchased to entertain crowds in circuses and fairs or in brothels to satisfy the tastes of a particularly discerning clientele.

Semi-underground human trafficking has always existed in Europe, which formally did not know slavery. Most often, the poor sold their children: a lot was born, and there was nothing to feed the extra mouths. Living goods were in demand, but it was the deviations and deformities that attracted the special attention of buyers. The demand was satisfied by the Comprachikos, who were in a continuous journey from city to city, from village to village and everywhere buying up children and adolescents.

But if there were no suitable disabled people, then an anesthetic broth, a knife, threads and ancient techniques with the help of which an ordinary person was turned into a living caricature were used. The main character of the novel, Hugo, had an eternal smile cut out on his face. Others had their growth slowed down or bones removed from their joints, or the spine was broken in a special way so that a hump would grow on the back. The child was told that he was ill, but would soon recover, he was put to sleep and…. By the way, then he could not wake up, because the monarchs and the owners of all kinds of collections of curiosities gladly bought up dead freaks in order to show them to guests in cans of alcohol. Peter I in the Kunstkamera had a whole collection of babies with various disabilities.

Hugo argued that at the same time the Comprachicos helped the royal houses solve problems with "inconvenient" heirs and superfluous figures in the "game of thrones": why kill and take a sin on your soul, when you can disfigure and sell to street acrobats? Only at the end of the 17th century, William III of Orange, who had just ascended the English throne, banned the activities of the comprachicos and began to systematically persecute them. But the trafficking of children with disabilities continued almost as early as the beginning of the 19th century.

There are almost no traces and references from this whole story in the sources. And many are even convinced that the Comprachicos are nothing more than a creepy invention of Hugo, who was based on obscure rumors of his time. But this profession still existed and apparently even today did not completely die everywhere. For example, in India, among the disabled, begging for alms on the steps of temples, there are people with obvious traces of gross surgical operations.

Barbers

Remember we mentioned them at the very beginning? Yes, in those good old days, a barber was not at all what a hairdresser or a barber today, and there is nothing strange in the fact that they were allowed to open corpses along with doctors. In addition to their main specialty, barbers worked part-time with what we would call “paramedicine” today: they removed calluses, opened up abscesses and boils, tore teeth, cauterized wounds and opened blood. That is, in fact, it was such medicine for the poor - the services of a real doctor who graduated from the medical department of the university were fabulously expensive and only a few could afford it. But everyone knew that bloodletting is the best medicine for almost half of the diseases. And they were treated by barbers.

Of course, the barbers had no idea about sterility, the rules of treatment and care, and the pharmacopoeia, so that "often" their treatment turned out to be worse than the disease and quickly brought them to the grave. In Russia, this parody of medicine flourished even at the beginning of the 20th century, only instead of hairdressers, bath attendants were engaged in bloodletting and other things. The connoisseur of old Moscow, Gilyarovsky, left an eerily naturalistic description of the operations carried out in the people's "trade" baths:

It's so good that the good old days are long gone and we now go to the hospital for treatment, and not to the bathhouse and not to the barbershop, right?

Continuing the theme of disappeared professions, screams, spitters, forge and other professions forgotten today, popular in Russia.