Bizarre History (13 page)

The ancient Aztec and Maya Indians of Central America played a game that looked a lot like lacrosse. Except, if your team lost, your captain had his heart removed and passed around for fans to eat. Another game they played was called
ullamaliztli,
which was played with a heavy, solid rubber ball. Like soccer, you couldn’t use your hands to control the ball, but neither could you use your feet. Instead teams batted the ball around with their hips and buttocks. What happened with the losing team? See above.

After ransacking a village, the Vikings would often resort to a game of tug-of-war to decide who got the plunder. The catch? The two teams would face off with a roaring fire between them. The winners would get the loot. The losers burned.

Pankration
was an ancient Greek wrestling match with a twist—there were no rules (or clothes). You could kick, scratch, wrestle, choke, tell your opponent to “Look at that pretty lady in Row B!” and then sucker punch him … whatever. It was considered bad form to kill your opponent.

Soule
was a popular game played by peasants in Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries. The rules were simple: Two teams of up to a thousand participants each had to get a large ball into the opponent’s net or onto their side. The game usually got violent and could last for several days—especially since the goals could be separated by miles of farmland, forests, meadows, rivers, etc.

Imagine it’s the 1600s and you’re tutor to the heir to the throne. It’s a pretty good gig, but what in heaven’s name do you do if the prince acts up or decides not to finish his lessons? Because of the doctrine of the divine rights of kings, which stated that a monarch has ultimate authority over man (which he got directly from God), you couldn’t exactly spank the royal’s highness. One solution was to assign a whipping boy. This poor kid, usually of high birth, would be raised alongside the prince, and every time the prince acted up, the whipping boy would be physically punished in front of the prince.

Meanwhile, in Ancient Greece, if a natural disaster struck (such as a famine, disease, or invasion), they would choose a
pharmakos
to take the blame. The
pharmakos
would usually be a beggar or a cripple, and he would be cast out of the community, stoned, or beaten to death so that the disaster would go away.

These days, the only thing truly scary about going to the doctor is the bill. However, the history of medicine and doctors is full of cures that did more to kill you than cure you. The ancient Egyptians, Africans, and Europeans all thought that epilepsy and mental illnesses could be cured by drilling a hole into your skull. This would release the demons from your head, and if you were lucky enough to survive, you got to keep the skull fragment they removed as a lucky charm. Back in the day, you could go to the barber for a haircut and a nice, healthy bloodletting, which was used to cure all sorts of maladies, such as fevers, colds, cancer, and of course, excessive bleeding!

In February 1685, we have what can be described as the worst cure ever. (And proof that peasants had a better chance at recovering from an illness than the aristocracy.) King Charles II of England suffered either a stroke or some sort of kidney dysfunction. All the royal doctors were summoned, and they immediately embarked on a treatment regimen that would have killed several healthy people. First, the bloodletting. Then they induced vomiting. Followed by an enema. When all that didn’t work, over the course of the five days it took the king to die, the good doctors filled his nose with snuff, let out some more blood, singed the king’s shaved scalp with burning irons, daubed his feet with pigeon poop, drilled a hole in his skull, applied heated cups to the skin (which formed blisters), applied more enemas, let out even more blood, fed him the gallstone from a goat, gave him a dose of forty drops of human skull, and more. And for all that, the king apologized: “I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such a time a-dying.”

Louis XI, king of France in the 1400s, liked animals. When he wasn’t hunting them, torturing them, or having them captured for his large zoo, he had them sing for him. In 1450, having grown tired of dressing up his pigs in clothing and wigs and sticking them with pins, he ordered the Abbot of Baigne to create a new musical instrument that incorporated pigs into its design. The abbot did as he was told, and before you knew it, there it was: a piano-type instrument that, when you played a key, stabbed a pig with a spike, making it cry. The pigs were arranged by the pitch in which they screamed, and by all accounts, the songs played were recognizable and the king and his attendants enjoyed the show immensely.

SIDE NOTE:
When Louis XI was feeling especially cruel, he ordered a game of manhunt in which prisoners were covered with deerskin and then chased and torn apart by the king’s hounds.

ANOTHER SIDE NOTE:
The inventor Athanasius Kircher designed a similar device in 1650—except he used cats. Here’s a description in the inventor’s own words (from his
Musurgia Universalis):
“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”

As I write, today’s most popular fashion statement is skinny jeans. And as with any fad, it must soon be followed by the medical condition it causes. Skinny jeans are said to cause
meraligia paresthetica,
which is also known as tingling thigh syndrome.
The New England Journal of Medicine
also warns of
jeans folliculitus,
which is a skin rash. Well, fashion throughout the course of history has been dangerous, as well as deadly. But remember, before you laugh at our ancestors, remember those skinny jeans.

Shoe fashion throughout history seemed more about danger than anything else. In Europe during the 1300s, the aristocracy began wearing shoes with long, pointed tips. (The best were shaped to look like male genitals and stuffed with fabric.) As the nobility were always seeking to outdo one another, the shoes got longer and longer until everyone at court was tripping all over the place. Instead of coming to their senses, however, they took care of the problem by tying the tips of their shoes to their legs with rope.

High heels have been around for quite some time. In sixteenth-century Europe, women’s heels reached the incredible height of two to three feet! These shoes, called
chopines,
proved useful since they kept women’s dress hems clean when walking along the poop-filled streets. (Where do you think the maids emptied the chamber pots, anyway?) The Catholic Church also approved, since if you can barely walk, surely you can’t dance … and if you can’t dance, well … This fashion statement fell out of favor eventually as women needed something to hold on to (a maid or a long cane) at all times, and they kept falling over and severely hurting themselves.