No, That STILL Wasn't Normal In The Victorian Era

Postmortem Photography Videos:

[CollateralDamage]

Absolutely splendid video! Loved all your observations. I can't resist adding a few of my own...

1) "Emmegation"? Apparently, I didn't get the memo about this hot new spelling of "emigration" as debuted in the first clip. Also, although it began in the Victorian era, the practice of sending children from care homes overseas continued well into the mid-20th century and wasn't abolished entirely until 1970.

2) Misdiagnoses of mental health conditions scarcely matter in cases where no effective treatments existed, and where the behaviour was sufficiently abnormal as to warrant confinement anyway. With regard to the "self pleasuring" which is so frequently mentioned in these videos, we never hear about the context, which was almost certainly that the person was doing this publicly or indiscreetly.

3) I'm so tired of these channels dredging up a few bizarre, little attested, and possibly heavily localised folk remedies and extrapolating them into having been considered best practice by medical professional for the whole of the Victorian period. It's like presuming a Pinterest sage gargle recipe for a sore throat is the same way Johns Hopkins would treat a case of tonsilitis.

[e.urbach]

That list of "reasons why people could be locked away in mental asylums", as far as I have seen, was curated from mental hospital records where the staff at the hospital interviewed the patients themselves, and *the patient themself gave the reasons why they had been brought to the hospital*! For the most part, it wasn't the evil relatives of the patient who were giving these random reasons for committing the patient to the hospital, and the doctors and nurses just accepting it!

My own grandmother spent a short time in a mental hospital in the 1960s after her mother died, and she wasn't able to be there at her mother's bedside and say goodbye one last time. She couldn't stop crying, and her brothers took her to the hospital to get some help, for about a week, until my grandfather arrived in town (a 4-day train trip away) and got her out. All she would tell the doctor, to explain why she was crying so much, was "I wasn't there when my mother died; she didn't get to see me one last time." What she didn't say was that she was the only daughter, and the only one of her mother's children who had moved out of state, and that her mother had physically protected her from her abusive father on a daily basis while her father was alive. Not being there so that her mother could see her one last time made her feel like she had abandoned the mother who had sacrificed so much for her. I can totally understand the depth and intensity of her grief and self-blaming (although it wasn't her fault, she was on the train on the way there when her mother died), but the doctor couldn't, and her hospital records reflected that!

[amylabus]

In the 21st century they had an extreme devotion to the Kardashian family. All women wanted to be them. All men wanted to marry them…..shudders for our history….

[quiestinliteris]

People positively cannot comprehend that "This thing happened" does not imply that the thing happened commonly or even more than once, for Pete's sake...

[jokerz]

From Antiquity to Early America Urine was used to wash clothing. It naturally had ammonia in it and could get stains out so they rinse the clothes in urine than water to get the urine out.

To us this seems gross but for centuries it was the only way to keep clothes clean and thus last longer.

Just because it seems strange to us doesn't mean it didn't serve a purpose once upon a time.

[cjdflkj]

Death photography happens today, I’ve known a photographer who did it as his sole line of focus, and several mothers to remember their children who passed. I don’t like how grieving practices that are harmless are treated as sensational.

[cjdflkj]

Chimney sweeps still exist! Rare, but they literally fix and clean chimneys!

[EmsIsFab]

People genuinely think people in the past were stupid. It is shocking every time.

[Swampzoid]

People have to exaggerate about a subject that they don't know enough about to make the real truth interesting.

[cjdflkj]

Lol, “saw dust” aka cellulose is put in cheese and granolas and such today. Human hair in pretty much all commercial bread as l-cysteine.

[cjdflkj]

Inorganic lead ingested isn’t metabolized, it’s pooped out. Organic lead in paint dust is the trouble.

[monascrafts]

Victorians would be traumatised if they saw the things that are normalised today.

[garlandfraley]

Stayed out of sun to have that porcelain look, beautiful

[Lils]

I think it would be cool to see a parody video that shows how clickbait channels like the one you mention would portray the 20th or 21st century in a hundred years time. Would they make out it was normal for all of us to poison our faces with botox and only communicate via social media

[alexmiles]

Maybe Bumble Bee chose to go to beauty school instead college-LOL! Good video. THX

[gleann_cuilinn]

The thing about mental asylums really bugs me, because I myself was given an inaccurate diagnosis and institutionalized against my will... in 2011. It didn't stop with the Victorians!

And more broadly, when a lot of these asylums shut down in the 1960s, the government never funded a better replacement, so the same people just started getting thrown into jails and prisons. This continues today, with a majority of people locked in our prisons having mental health problems. It's really not different from the old insane asylums. In fact it might be worse!

[lucyalderman]

During the slave years in the US after trading was illegal baby farming on the plantation were so common that yes baby farming for more slaves did happen

[rhondacrosswhite]

I see that I’m early enough to the game that not many of us have enjoyed his video. I just want to say thank you for keeping history interesting and busting a few myths.

[lainiwakura]

Once those mentally ill people's prisons sentences are over, they're tossed out onto the streets as well. They end up living like animals: fending for themselves and foraging for food.

[garlandfraley]

We are so weird as a society NOW just imagine what our legacy will be 😮