Welcome to my Tuesday
I found this huge treasure trove of medical objects online and I’ve digging through them for the past hour. You should too. Go to the site and pick a theme (surgery! birth and death! mental illness!) and then get horrified by medical stuff from the 1300s on up to today. Here’s a random sampling!
This is a cramp ring from the 14th century. Back then, the English monarch would bless rings by touching them, which gave the rings the power to heal. They were given out every Good Friday at the altar of the Chapel Royal in the Tower of London. They were said to ward off cramps and epilepsy.
This is a jar for Nervin, a nerve tonic used in the 1700s in the Netherlands.
These are prosthetic lower limbs, made for kids born with their feet attached to their bodies without legs, a condition that happened a lot in the 60s thanks to horrible “morning sickness drug” Thalidomide.
Cranial crochet hooks, used by Egyptians to very very carefully remove the brain through the nose after death.
