5 Diseases Folks Made Up to Scare You Off New Tech (2024)

5 Bicycle Face

Late in the 19th century, once the bicycle was a fairly well-established device, doctors noticed cyclists coming down with all sorts of ailments. There was the cyclist who suddenly suffered an inflamed appendix, and there were the multiple competitors at a race who seemed to come down with dementia. There was also the cyclist who suffered from exophthalmic goiter — a condition that involves not just an enlarged thyroid but bulging eyes.

You might point out that, if a large enough number of people go biking, a bunch of them are going to get any number of maladies, because that’s how large numbers work. But doctors proposed that cycling offered a unique threat to health. When you try lifting something heavy, you quickly become tired, and your willpower gives out before your body does. When you bike? It feels so easy, you can travel for hours. That means (said doctors at the time) you don’t even realize how much you’re overexerting yourself.

A British doctor named A. Shadwell proposed an extra issue. The struggle to maintain balance on a bicycle added mental strain, beyond anything you’d experience on a comfy tricycle. This resulted in what he termed “bicycle face.”

Many people agreed that cycling causes bicycle face, especially in women. Only, they couldn’t agree on exactly what bicycle face was. Some said it made the face flushed. Some said it made the face pale. It could make your eyes bulge (that’s the dreaded exophthalmia again), or it could just leave them with dark circles. It could make you look intense, or it could make you look weary.

It left people quite worried for a while that bicycles could leave them permanently ugly. Or temporarily ugly — again, no one could agree. Then a couple years passed, and people said, “Hey, biking didn’t do anything to our faces, other that marginally help retain our youth,” and bicycle face was forgotten.

4 Railway Spine

Rail travel seemed even riskier than cycling, and we’re not just talking about what happens when trains crash. Many people initially believed that the human body couldn’t withstand the high speeds that engines can generate. Indeed, sufficiently high acceleration can rip your body apart, but people back then placed the imaginary bar for this quite low, fearing that speeds of 50 miles per hour could doom your bodily integrity. Here, too, the greatest fears surrounded women’s bodies, with American doctors suggesting that these speeds would cause the untethered uterus to fly out of the body.

A few years of train traveling without incident dispelled that idea. But then people observed a new syndrome related to train travel, and this one appeared to be real.

This happened after train collisions, but it involved no visible physical injury. Despite having broken no bones and suffered no bruises, passengers reported back pain. Perhaps some unknown organ back there was susceptible to injury thanks the unique nature of rail travel. Passengers suffered other symptoms as well. Some suffered amnesia of the accident. Others went the other extreme and recalled the experience most intensely. When women experienced such emotional symptoms, doctors would call that hysteria, but this hit male passengers as well. Doctors in the 1860s named the new condition “railway spine.”

Today, we look back and think that some of those patients really did suffer spinal injuries that weren’t physically visible. As for the ones who showed psychological symptoms, that was different. Today, we’d call that PTSD.

They knew about PTSD at the time, to some extent. They saw it in military veterans, and they’d go on to call it “shell shock.” When something similar happened to someone in a totally different situation, they figured it was an unrelated illness, and the culprit wasn’t trauma. The culprit was trains.

3 Coffee Impotence

In 1674, in London, a petition circulated, addressed to the proprietors of the city’s new coffee houses. Coffee was affecting the menfolk of the city, said the petition. This effect was quite different from that traditional drink, alcohol, which merely made men angry and violent. Coffee rendered men impotent. The petitioner was anonymous, identified only as “a well-willer,” but they claimed to speak on behalf of London’s women.

“The continual sipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch men of two-and-twenty and tie up the codpiece-point without a charm,” read the petition. “They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty noses, nothing stiff but their joints, nor standing but their ears.”

The complaint dragged on for six pages, concluding by saying: “We humbly pray that you, our trusty patrons, would improve your interest, that henceforth drinking coffee may on severe penalties be forbidden to all persons under the age of threescore; and that instead thereof, lusty nappy beer, co*ck-ale, and back-recruiting chocolate be recommended to general use.”

Today, such a petition would inspire much mockery. The 17th century was no different. A different unnamed writer composed a “men’s answer” to the petition:

Coffee actually improves sexual prowess, claimed this response. “The truth is,” it maintained, “it rather assists us for your nocturnal benevolences, by drying up those crude flatulent humors, which otherwise would make us only flash in the pan without doing that thundering execution which your expectations exact.” As proof, look to how much coffee they drink in Turkey. “No part of the world can boast more able or eager performers than those circumcised gentlemen, who own no other joys of heaven than what consists in venereal titillations.”

Given that coffee does not cause impotence, we can only conclude that the original petition wasn’t a genuine complaint from the wives of London. It was an attempt by persons unknown to get people debating the effects of coffee. This attempt succeeded. A year later, King Charles II tried to ban coffeehouses.

The real motive here wasn’t preserving virility. It was preserving conformity. Coffeehouses were where men met and hatched radical plans, and shutting the places down could keep people from rebelling against the Crown. Of course, men also met in pubs, but the guys there either ended up too drunk to plan anything or just conveniently fought each other.

2 Book Mania

Keeping in mind that leaders don’t always like people exchanging ideas, you might be aware that various politicians have tried clamping down on literacy. In the 18th century, moralists called books dangerous — but they weren’t talking about people educating themselves by reading nonfiction. They were talking about the danger posed by novels. And while the greatest backlash fell upon popular novels about sex (just like deeply repressed people object to such novels today), all novels supposedly presented a risk.

The fear was that readers who obsessively dipped into these novels would stop being able to distinguish reality from fiction. Many novels at the time were titled as though they were true accounts. For example, you had Tristram Shandy, whose longer title we mentioned above,The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling andClarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady. Maybe readers would think these were actual biographies, or would mistake newspapers for novels in the future — if you have absolutely zero faith in readers’ brain function.

Beyond this, people labeled reading an addiction, which they named “book mania” or reading lust. Hunching down and staring at something clenched in your palm couldn’t possibly be healthy, people reasoned. These novels were often printed on what’s called Duodecimo size paper, measuring 7 inches by 4 inches, which isn’t so far off from the size of the cell phones that are said to be rotting everyone’s brains today.

The prescription for people suffering from book mania? More books, believe it or not. Only, these were nonfiction books, known at the time as “histories.” That might not sound like as much fun as what book maniacs wanted to read. But then, you’re reading about history this very second, instead of reading novels, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad trade after all.

1 Sewing Machine Lesbianism

In 1886, a German book titled Psychopathia Sexualis aimed to explain many “pathological manifestations of the sexual life.” It featured a small section titled “Lesbian Love,” sandwiched between sections on Cultivated Pederasty and Necrophilia. What was the cause, pondered Dr. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, of this vice? It usually does not result from any innate impulse, he claimed, so something else had to be responsible.

He placed some of the blame on that familiar culprit — novels. He also speculated that it had something to do with servants sleeping in the same bed. But there was a third likely cause, and it had to do with how much time women spent using sewing machines. Such machines lead to “the excitement of the genitalia,” and if women realized they could be aroused without the intervention of a man, pairing with one another was the next logical step.

An earlier dubious account by French physician Thésée Pouillet supported this claim of the sewing machine’s stimulating effects (though it said nothing about a gateway to lesbianism). He described visiting a factory that made military uniforms and watching one worker’s reactions to using a sewing machine.

“I saw her eyes convulse, her eyelids drop, her head turn pale and fall back,” he wrote. “A little muffled cry, followed by a long sigh, was lost in the noise of the workshop. The young girl remained swooning for a few seconds, pulled out her handkerchief, wiped her temples where the sweat was beading, cast a timid, ashamed, still slightly bewildered look. ... My companion began to smile and told me that this was so frequent that they hardly paid any attention to it.”

Before this, moralists had recommended sewing as a saintly occupation. Women were supposed to sew in their spare time because “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” — sewing by hand was a great way to teach girls not to masturbat*. This news that sewing machines did the exact opposite was troubling, and the confident assertion that they were outright turning women gay was more troubling still.

This led some manufacturers to redesign the machines. Sewing machines at the time were powered by foot pedals (they were not electric; these were not vibrators). You’d alternate which pedal you pushed, and this meant your legs rubbed against each other. A new machine design instead had you push both pedals simultaneously, and it advertised itself as requiring less labor, though that wasn’t true.

That Frenchman, Pouillet, went on to note that another invention used pedals and therefore spelled even greater danger for women’s sexual normalcy. This invention was the bicycle. And now that you know the erotic connection people believed those two machines shared, maybe you can understand this otherwise incomprehensible comic from 1895:

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