Name: Things People Used to Believe You Will Laugh At Today
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T11:14:03.000Z
Duration: 19 min 44 s
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Did you know we used to put radium inside health drinks and it did horrifying things to its drinkers?

Also, the guy who discovered Uranus actually thought the sun was cold.

And when we tell you about when doctors realized babies were capable of feeling pain, your jaw is going to hit the floor.

We'll be explaining it all on today's episode of The Infographics Show, Things People Used To Believe You Will Laugh At Today. 18.

When they were first introduced to the public in the 1800s, there were so many bizarre beliefs about them that the medical community started to take note of Railway Madmen.

What exactly is a Railway Madman, you might ask?

It's a made-up idea grounded in some of the weirdest bunk science we've ever heard.

Today, if you're on a highway, stuck by someone doing 30 miles an hour, you might find yourself tearing your hair out in sheer frustration.

But in the 1860s and 1870s, they believed that going 30 miles per hour on a train was so intense, so dangerous, that it might deprive the brain of oxygen.

That, coupled with the nerve-shattering noise these metal behemoths generated, could drive normal people to violent madness.

So next time you're on a train, be sure to stay vigilant of the Railway Madmen.

Or don't, because obviously all of this was complete nonsense.

Somehow, that's not even the craziest theory connected to the old, timey trains.

Some doctors believed that if the train's speed reached 50 miles per hour, uteruses would start flying out of bodies.

Thankfully, that's just another crackpot theory.

And that wasn't the only insane belief that people had about uteruses in the past. 17.

These days, we use the word hysteria to describe chaos, panic, or a group caught up in collective madness.

But back in the days of vintage medicine, hysteria was something very specific.

A so-called illness that, according to the experts of the time, could only affect women.

Hysteria comes from the Latin word hystericus, meaning womb, because the doctors of the time believed that madness was caused by the woman's uterus detaching and wandering around the afflicted body.

One of the most common forms of treatment for this would be the doctors manually stimulating the lady parts of these women to the point of, uh, happiness, which would presumably lure that rogue womb back to its proper place.

But our next archaic belief is so downright nutty that it makes the railway madmen look like railway sane men, and wandering uteruses look like an accredited psychology degree. 16.

Welcome to the wild and wacky world of spontaneous generation, an ancient theory for where certain kinds of life came from.

Even though it's both utterly wrong and completely insane, we've almost got to respect it for its sheer loony creativity.

So how exactly did spontaneous generation work?

The theory goes that certain creatures can be spontaneously generated out of non-organic matter, rather than them just being attracted to that matter.

For example, people believed that wasps were spontaneously generated by the rotting of dead horses.

The ancient Greeks believed that snakes originally came from the blood of Medusa.

But when the Medusa blood ran out, snakes just spontaneously generated from the bone marrow of dead people's spines.

Frogs were believed to have just emerged from mud, fully formed.

And if you put a dirty cloth into wheat for 21 days, you'd get mice.

The list goes on, but that seems like enough to get the idea of just how crazy this belief was.

And even crazier, it didn't fully die out until the 19th century when Louis Pasteur, the namesake for the pasteurization process, presented the world with proof of microorganisms reproducing.

So you better get your dirty underwear out of the wheat shed.

It won't win you any pet mice, no matter how hard you try.

Proponents of spontaneous generation were on a similar mental track to the lunatics who came up with the vegetable lamb of Tartary. 15.

Yes, it is every bit as bizarre as it sounds.

A strange blend of misinformation, myth, and a hefty dose of Orientalism.

The legend dates all the way back to ancient Greece, specifically the historian Herodotus.

He and others believed in the existence of a mythical plant creature from Asia that supposedly grew fruit unlike anything else from Earth.

Stay with us here, but we can't promise it's going to get any less weird.

The mythical beast was both a plant and an animal.

The lambs would grow at the end of the stalks and slowly eat all of the other foliage around the plant.

And when the foliage ran out, the lambs would die.

And farmers would then harvest the dead lamb plant's wool.

Its blood also apparently tasted as sweet as honey, except of course it didn't because the ridiculous thing never actually existed.

People did really believe it, for centuries though.

Let's leave the world of bunk biology for a second and instead look at an insane, vintage idea from the world of astronomy. 14.

William Herschel was an extremely important figure in the field of astronomy.

Not that he was a devoted booty hunter, but even geniuses can still miss mountain men.

Like with Herschel's theory that not only was the sun not hot, it was cool enough to be habitable.

Agnes Klerk, a 19th century astrology historian, described that Herschel thought the sun was a cool, dark, solid globe clothed in luxuriant vegetation.

It was richly stored with inhabitants, protected by a heavy cloud canopy from the intolerable glare of the upper luminous region.

Now I hope we don't need to tell you that isn't true, but hey, you've at least got to admire the guy's optimism.

But we probably shouldn't think about fleeing to another planet until we've fixed all the problems we're facing here on Earth. 13.

If you asked a God-fearing peasant from the middle ages, they might tell you that a major problem is witches stealing your penis.

Now that's pretty weird already, but when you find out about why these servants of the devil were performing magical dong abductions, it is going to get even weirder.

Witches performing anti-penis spells have been an oddly consistent fixture of myths all across the globe, but in Europe they found their roots in a 15th century book called the Malleus Maleficarum by witch hunter Heinrich Kramer.

Among the hundreds of absolutely wild and obviously completely unscientific claims in the book, Kramer said that witches liked to use their magic to make penises of their victims vanish.

They then keep those penises, still living independently of the bodies that they've been taken from, as a kind of pet, feeding them oats to keep them alive.

So at least if a witch does take your penis, you can take comfort in knowing that its new owner is taking good care of it.

From one cylinder to another, let's talk about carrots. 12.

When you were young, especially if you were in the older end of our audience, you might have heard that if you made like Bugs Bunny and you ate your carrots, it would help improve your vision.

This, as it turns out, is actually a complete fabrication.

You should still eat your carrots though, they're good for you.

But unlike a lot of things on this list, the misinformation around the ability of carrots to improve your vision wasn't just misinformation built on ignorance.

It was a concerted propaganda campaign from the Allies during World War II.

It is true that without the retinol and the vitamin A that carrots are rich in, your ability to see in the dark will be diminished.

The British Air Ministry seized on this fact to make a cunning misinformation campaign against Nazi pilots during the war.

They didn't want to show their hand with the radar technology that they were using to detect German planes.

So to throw the German forces off of the scent, the British Air Ministry claimed that their pilots were eating huge amounts of carrots, giving them far better night vision than their Nazi counterparts.

This not only kept the radar tech a secret, it also tricked whole generations into thinking that carrots will give them supervision.

And if that applies to you, sound off about it in the comments.

Speaking of comments, this section might get us some angry comments from people who still believe it.

Homeopathy, started in 1796 by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, is too Byzantine to discuss in full here.

But one of the most deranged and completely unscientific principles is the idea of like cures like.

It's the fantastical view that illnesses can be cured by taking in a cure that is similar to the afflicted part.

Well, since onions are known to cause those symptoms when you're cutting them, you should take a medicine that contains onions.

Having trouble sleeping or got a restless mind?

Since drinking too much coffee can cause those symptoms, taking a medicine that contains coffee is the best homeopathic way to solve it.

Do we even need to tell you that this is completely unscientific and it won't help at all?

There is that old expression, what do you call alternative medicine that works?  But before we get too smug about how dumb people were in the distant past, here is a fresher discovered piece of misinformation that you might have even believed until recently.

If you read any human biology textbook in the late 90s and early 2000s, you might have tongue that is divided into different kinds of chemicals or flavors that each part of the tongue can detect.

Sweet, spicy, salty, sour, you get the idea.

However, this idea, known as the taste map, has actually been completely debunked.

All of your taste buds play a role in processing every flavor, regardless of where on the tongue they're situated.

Despite it being discredited though, the taste map is still taught in plenty of schools.

So if your science teacher tries to teach you the taste map, tell them they're wrong and then tell them the infographic show sent you. 9.

History is full of bizarre attempts to understand how our bodies work.

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Things People Used to Believe You Will Laugh At Today

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