Podbit · Stuff You Should Know
Because birthmarks have no known cause, cultures worldwide invented explanations blaming the pregnant mother. Being startled and touching her face, eating too many strawberries, drinking port wine, gazing at fire — all were supposedly capable of marking the unborn child. The X-ray version persisted into the modern era.
Scurvy killed sailors for lack of limes, which is why the British are called 'limeys.' Sick sailors were stored in the lower hold to get them 'under the weather.' And silent film directors begged editors to 'cut to the chase' past boring romance scenes.
Alex's father fled the Iranian Revolution, failed medical school twice in a foreign language, completed residency as the only Middle Eastern applicant, then built a surgery center from Home Depot materials to spec. His advice to Alex was conservative — and it came from earned wisdom. It just wasn't the right advice for Alex's goals.
30,000 years ago the ideal woman was all hips, thighs, and enormous breasts — fertility was beauty. Then ancient Egypt flipped the script entirely: thin limbs, no curves, full hairlessness achieved with flint scrapers. The pendulum was already swinging before civilisation had even got going.
Rome brought the bush back. After Egypt's hairless obsession, Romans saw vanity as weakness — the hairier and smellier, the better. Meanwhile Nero's wife bathed daily in donkey milk to fight wrinkles, requiring hundreds of lactating donkeys on staff.
Christianity made vanity a sin — so Medieval Europe turned beauty on its head. The ideal woman had a huge plucked-back forehead, tiny mouth, and small hands. Looking good was morally suspicious. Harry Maguire would have been a medieval pin-up.
Among the Berber people of Northwest Africa, obesity was the beauty ideal — so 'fatteners' force-fed girls as young as five up to 20 litres of camel milk and 2 kilos of millet with butter daily. Nearly 21,000 calories. More than a sumo wrestler.
In the 1850s, Francis Galton travelled to what is now Namibia and was stunned by the indigenous women's proportions. Unable to speak the language, he hid at a distance and used a naval sextant to measure their buttocks, then walked to the spot to calculate exact dimensions. He then came home and built an attractiveness map of Britain.
Galton invented an early clicker device to covertly rate women on the streets of British cities as 'attractive', 'neutral', or 'repellent'. He never published the full map, but noted London topped the rankings and Aberdeen was the most repellent city in Britain.
Victorian women swallowed tapeworm eggs in pill form to stay thin. They also used belladonna eye drops for a dreamy, dilated look — with side effects including hallucinations, diarrhoea, dementia, and potentially death. Heroin chic had nothing on this era.
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