hello hi! chiming in as a museum professional who works with 19th century social history because I have thoughts
this will get Long; ye be warned
a lot of the things mentioned here are commonly misrepresented and/or miscontextualized, and this post is no exception. I don't blame OP at all, mind- when I say "misrepresented," I mean "in the media at large, including from sources positioning themselves as reliable." I've fallen prey to it, too! we all have! nobody is born with historical knowledge!
(I am going to beat the Hidden Killers series to death with a big sign that says "just because you found examples of people dying from it, doesn't mean dying from it was commonplace")
like the nipple piercing thing, for example. yes, there are sources from the Victorian era saying that nipple piercings were common...but those sources are anonymous letters written to magazines, we've never found letters or diary entries talking about nipple piercing or any known extant examples of nipple jewelry, and there was a phenomenon of magazines publishing thinly-veiled fetish letters at the time. so really, the evidence for such a trend existing is lacking
or the arsenic thing. they weren't smearing it on their faces- they were taking it orally. or believed they were. which, on the surface, sounds equally weird! until you see ads and realize that these products were touted as "safe arsenical complexion wafers." Dangerous Chemical In Small Amounts Is Helpful is a very old and frankly true idea! nowadays, some people inject small amounts of botulinim toxin into their faces for beauty, and it's not because they think the toxin is totally safe in all quantities! it's because they know a small amount won't hurt them, and that's what proponents of the arsenical complexion wafers believed
...I say "believed" because at least one popular brand of wafers was tested in a New England medican journal in the early 1870s and found to actually contain no arsenic. so it was mostly just a scam. and accounts of heavy-metal makeup were mostly shock stories about a likely-imaginary practice among wealthy women called "enamelling," or creating a mask of lead and arsenic makeup on the skin that was undetectable but Definitely there We Promise. it was seen as a BAD thing, not something everybody- or probably, anybody -rushed out to do
and that comes into play a lot in our popular ideas of the era, I think- the misconception that they didn't know the dangers or didn't care, or an imperfect idea of what those dangers were that stems from taking everything we read at face value devoid of context
I've read articles from the mid-late 19th century talking about the dangers of lead. they knew! they just didn't have anything to replace it with in all the myriad uses to which it was put, so they kind of...shrugged and encouraged the public to take precautions where they could. remind you of anything today? microplastics, maybe?
similarly, cocaine was one of the best analgesics on the market from the 1880s onward. doctors knew it could be habit-forming! but people were suffering and it was the best they had, so...
(also, less regulation meant people could sell basically whatever they wanted under any claims and nobody would know the difference unless there was a major consumer outcry about harmful products. food adulteration was known, and most people thought it was a problem- it was just harder to avoid it, because food producers weren't as regulated as they are now. and I say this in the past tense, but like...it definitely still happens today. just less often)
and where things really were kept from the public's knowledge, like in the case of asbestos or (later, in the early 20th century; OP got his dating a bit off with this one) radium, that's not so much that they were incurious as like. they trusted big, seemingly reputable companies not to lie to them. see also: PFAs, microplastics, fossil fuels, thalidomide...we post-Victorians have seen our share of that, too.
(and as for electrical teething troubles, I lost an apartment in an e-bike battery fire in 2023. we're definitely not perfect on that score either, and I'm sure that will seem as insane to our descendants as ungrounded electrical wires seem to us. because they'll have the benefit of experience! like we have with electricity!)
so why, in my opinion, were the Victorians so weird?
they were basically like all other humans before or since, because. you know. they were humans
it's when our preconcieved notions of what the Victorian era was- fueled by sensationalized media, tall tales from the era itself, and a million other sources -comes up against the messy, horny, rule-breaking, technological-mishap-plagued reality of basically any era in human history that we come away with this Oh Wow the Uptight Prudes Had Sex And Used Cocaine A Lot! So Weird! impression
and because we think they were uptight prudes, people tend to want to present anything that contradicts that image in the most sensational light possible. so "some women took what they believed was a skincare drug with a safe amount of a known toxin" turns into "they SMEARED their FACES with ARSENIC!!!!" and so on
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2087
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