February 2012
20 posts
Anonymous asked: oh gosh, i only just realized you're Autopic... well, i must admit that i love both blogs :)
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'The World's Ugliest Woman'
Mary Ann Bevans, most likely suffered from acromegaly (a syndrome characterised by ‘bulging’ of body parts, most noticeably the face). She was born Mary Ann Webster in London, England in 1874 as one of eight children. She was employed as a nurse and began to display characteristics of acromegaly shortly after her marriage in 1903.
Following the passing of her husband in 1914, found...
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Len and Ernie
On July 7th, 1931 in Winnipeg, Manitoba Ernie Defort was born with a parasitic twin attached at to his sternum.
Ernie’s brother consisted of a headless rudimentary body with two arms and two legs. As such, Erie was billed as being ‘Two Boys with One Head’. Ernie’s twin was even given a name, and together they were often billed as ‘Len and Ernie’ or sometimes ‘Lester and Ernie’. The body was...
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'The Pony Boy'
Robert Huddleston (‘The Pony Boy’) was likely afflicted with a very advanced form ofcongenital genu recurvatum – also known as ‘back knee deformity’.
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'The Bearded Baroness'
Sidonia De Barcsy, unlike other bearded ladies, was a genuine member of a royal family. She was born in Hungary on May 1st, 1866.
After she gave birth to a dwarf son at the age of 19, she began to grow facial hair on her cheeks. Within months, she had grown an 8 inch beard. Her husband expressed a fondness for her beard and even threatened to divorce her if she shaved.
The Baron knew there...
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'The Transparent Man'
Ivannow Wladislaus von Dziarski-Orloff was born in Hungary in 1864. While he was completely normal during his childhood, at the age of 14 he began to experience an unknown wasting disease. By early adulthood, Orloff was little more than a living skeleton – unable to stand and in constant pain. To deal with his tragic pain, Orloff took to the opium pipe – strangely enough the pipe became...
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Lobotomies
A lobotomy is a neurosurgical procedure; a form of psychosurgery that consists of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex (gif - highlighted red). It was a mainstream procedure for more than two decades, prescribed for psychiatric (and occasionally other) conditions—this despite general recognition of frequent and serious side-effects.
Early lobotomies were performed by drilling...
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'The Living Skeleton'
Isaac W. Sprague was a famous ‘Human Skeleton’. Although normal for most of his childhood, Sprague began losing weight at age 12. In 1865, he joined a circus sideshow, becoming “the Living Skeleton” or “the Original Thin Man”. The next year P.T Barnum (American showman, businessman, scam artist) hired Sprague to work at his American Museum until it burned down...
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Agent Orange
Agent Orange is the code name for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S Military as part of its herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. During the Vietnam War the United States military sprayed chemical herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia. The program’s goal was to defoliate forested and rural land, depriving...
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Sleeping Beauty
There are many variations of the ‘original’ tale of Sleeping Beauty, the most notable being this version.
In the supposed original tale, the Great King is warned by Wise Men that his daughter, Talia (Sleeping Beauty) is in danger, as there is poison in the palace’s flax (Flax- A blue-flowered herbaceous plant that is cultivated for its seed (linseed) and for textile fiber made...
January 2012
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December 2011
22 posts
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Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Fetal alcohol syndrome is growth, mental, and physical problems that may occur in a baby when a mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy.
A physical exam of the baby may show a heart murmur or other heart problems. As the baby grows, there may be signs of delayed mental development. There also may be problems with the face and bones.
A baby with fetal alcohol syndrome may have the following...
Foot Binding
Foot binding was the Chinese custom of binding the feet of young girls painfully tight to prevent further growth. The tiny narrow feet were considered beautiful and to make a woman’s movements more feminine and dainty. Foot-binding resulted in lifelong disabilities for most of its subjects. The process was started before the arch of the foot had a chance to develop fully, usually between...
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Kadaververwertungsanstalt
The Kadaververwertungsanstalten (“corpse utilization factories”), also sometimes called the “German Corpse-Rendering Works” or “Tallow Factory” was one of the most notorious British anti-German propaganda efforts of World War.
According to the story, the Kadaververwertungsanstalten was a special installation supposedly operated by the Germans in which, because...
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True Urban Legend: 3 - The Fatal Hairdo
The Ledgend
There are lots of variations of this legend; Teenage girl has a beehive up-do, she washes it with sugar-water, allowing the hair to harden to maintain its shape. She slept on a towel and a special half-pillow so as not to ruin her hair. One day she did not come down for breakfast, her mother went to her room to find her dead, unwrapping the towel from around her hair she discovered...
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Unusual deaths: Sheila Decoster - 2011
Sheila Decoster, 62, died from asphyxiation after falling head first into a recycling bin at her home in Toledo, Ohio.
Unusual deaths: Channing Askew - 2011
A 47-year-old man died after trying to cut out his own heart pacemaker from his chest. Channing Askew, who lived in Chicago, told friends he was experiencing chest pains and asked for an ambulance was called. While waiting for an ambulance he attempted to gouge out the device using a screwdriver or knife.
Learned Helplessness
In 2965, psychologists Mark Seligman and Steve Maier conducted and experiment in which three groups of dogs were places in harnesses.
Dogs from group one were released after a certain amount of time, with no harm done. Dogs from group two were paired up and leashed together, and one from each pair received electrical shocks that could be ended by pressing a lever. Dogs from group three were also...
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Harlow's Monkey Experiments
Harry Harlow is infamous for being insensitive towards animals - his studies caused disturbance to many monkeys. One of Harlow’s experiments saw baby monkeys separated from their mothers, whom they had only just bonded to. The tiny monkeys had no friends or family for social support.
Harlow put the baby monkeys in pits, he called each a ‘Pit of Despair’. The monkeys were kept...
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The Little Mermaid
In the original story of ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘Ariel’ (originally named Sirenetta), asked the Witch to give her human legs, she was warned that she would ‘suffer horribly, as though a sword were cutting you apart. And every time you place your feet on the earth, you will feel dreadful pain!’ and was also warned that if the man she loved married another woman,...
Highest Bid
I’d just won a bidding war on a One Armed Bandit on eBay; my winning bid was only £140, I just couldn’t resist. It was pick up only, so I emailed the owner to inform him I would be picking it up the same night.
I set off on the 3 or so hour journey to Yorkshire while the sun was still out, with my daughter and her science revision to keep me company. I sped down the winding country...
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Little Albert
John Watson was a psychologist who was apt to using orphans in his experiments. Watson wanted to test the idea that fear was innate or a conditioned response.
Little Albert (the nickname given to the nine month old infant that Watson chose from a hospital) was exposed to a white rabbit, a white rat, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspaper, and a miscellanea of...
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Anonymous asked: u havent written any stories in a while :(
David Riemer
David Reimer was born as a male identical twin. His birth name was Bruce; his twin was named Brian. At the age of 6 months, after concern was raised about how they both urinated, the boys were diagnosed with phimosis. They were referred for circumcision at the age of 8 months. On April 27, 1966, a urologist performed the operation using the unconventional method of cauterization. The procedure...
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Monkey Drug Trials
In the monkey drug trials of 1969, a large group of monkeys and rats were trained to inject themselves with an assortment of drugs, including morphine, alcohol, codeine, cocaine, and amphetamines. The animals were left to their own devices - once they were capable of self-injecting - with an abundance of each drug.
Some animals tried so hard to escape their torment that they broke their arms in...
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The Aversion Project
South Africa’s apartheid army forced white lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-change’ operations in the 1970′s and the 1980′s, and submitted many to chemical castration, electric shock, and other unethical medical experiments. Although the exact number is not known, former apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many as 900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’ operations may have been performed...
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The 4 seasons of Streatham Cemetery →
Beautiful.
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g3mm4 asked: your blog is so perfect! x
November 2011
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Unit 731
Unit 731 was an experiment carried out by the Imperial Japanese Army from 1937 to 1945. Living people were vivisected; limbs of prisoners were removed and stitched onto different parts of their bodies while the others were frozen and then thawed. Some prisoners were injected with different diseases and then studied.
