Victorian tapeworm diet pills
In the Victorian era, women took tapeworm eggs in pill form as a diet aid, with side effects including diarrhoea, vomiting, eye problems, epilepsy, and dementia.
Snapshot · Fin vs History
Big Botticelli Gyal (with Paddy Young!) | The History of Beauty Standards (Part 1)
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Jul 20, 2026
Where this was said
Our First Phrenology
At 45:41 · chapter starts 44:36
This is the episode's centrepiece. Fin walks through Galton's 1850s tour of Southern Africa: stunned by the proportions of indigenous Namibian women, unable to speak the local language, Galton hid at a distance and used a naval sextant to measure their buttocks. He then walked to the spot and used geographic distance instruments to calculate the exact proportions — the hosts marvel that pornography has robbed us of this level of dedicated ingenuity. Back in Britain, Galton invented an early pin-clicker to rate women on the streets of various cities as 'attractive', 'neutral', or 'repellent'. He never published the full map, but his diaries note London topped the rankings and Aberdeen was the most repellent. Inspired, the hosts break out calipers for the episode's first phrenology segment. Paddy Young's skull is measured: small forehead relative to his overall head size, meaning animalistic drive without great intellectual capacity. The diagnosis is delivered with solemnity: Paddy is a himbo — enthusiastic, puppyish, energetic, but not a scholar.
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