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Urban legend originating from the mid nineteen fifties would have you think. Opera singer Maria Kallis lost sixty five pounds on the tapeworm diet, a diet where she allegedly swallowed a parasite packed pill to consume calories for her Now that's been debunked. It's confirmed by her biography and personal communications that though she was diagnosed with a beef tapeworm, it was due to eating raw meat and wasn't something
she did on purpose. But it probably goes without saying, though, that humans have done some very strange things in the name of beauty and fashion over the centuries. The tapeworm diet was and unfortunately still is a real thing, and it was once a super popular attempt at weight loss. So let's talk tapeworms. Perhaps one of our grossest episodes yet, Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky.
And I'm Holly Frye. So getting yourself a parasitic buddy will help you lose weight, But please, for the love of all that's holy, don't do it. The idea here is that the tapeworm lives in your intestines and basically eats whatever you're eating, meaning you can go for seconds and thirds without feeling guilty about any of the calories is you're not absorbing them. That doesn't sound so bad right until you get to the tapeworm part. That is,
tapeworm should not be inside your body period. They can get in there by accident, though, and that can happen if, for instance, you consume raw or undercooked meat that includes beef, pork, or fish, or if you drink contaminated water. You could also become infected after handling food, water, or objects that have been contaminated with feces. Close physical contact with your dog, such as allowing them to lick your face, is also
a risk for developing a tapeworm infection. However, if you lived in London between roughly eighteen thirty and nineteen hundred, there's a good chance you might have intentionally swallowed a tapeworm for weight loss.
The fad would also hit the United States, but not until a bit later in the early nineteen hundreds. We should note, though, that while we'll be talking about the Victorian tapeworm diet. Tyra Banks talked about the diet on her show back in two thousand and nine. Courtney Kardashian joked about wanting a tapeworm as recently as twenty fifteen, and in twenty thirteen, a woman from Iowa consumed tapeworm pills for weight loss, which resulted in an official warning
from the Iowa State Department of Public Health. This is one of those things that just hasn't gone.
Away, and that's maybe because the tapeworm diet sounds pretty easy. All you needed was a little pill that was in victorian times advertised with claims like easily swallowed, sanitized and jar packed. One popular ad read Eat Eat, Eat, and all was stay thin, no diet, no baths, no exercise, no danger, guaranteed harmless fat. The enemy that is shortening
your life banished. How with sanitized tapeworms jar packed friends for a fair form, easy to swallow, no ill effects, prepared by wt Bridge chemist, New York, send no money, particulars mailed free. To be clear, nothing about tapeworms is sanitary, but product labels surely did proudly claim that their pills were safe.
How did this even become a thing? You might be wondering these standards are problematic now, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ideas about feminine beauty included pale skin, rosy cheeks, red lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. Women
were also expected to be wafishly thin. A sixteen inch waist, yes sixteen was ideal by some standards, and women also needed to be graceful and polite, according to a series of essays on the subject at the time, quote politeness may be defined as a dexterous management of our words and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves.
One of the most popular beauty guides of the era, an unfortunate book called The Ugly Girl Papers, written by SD Powers and published in eighteen seventy four, was a sort of self help guide for the quote unquote ugly women in society, with tips on how to become more beautiful, and even stated that quote it is a woman's business to be beautiful. Beauty takes time and effort, the book bok explained, and if you wanted to find a husband,
you needed to put in the time. This body shaming guide had the gall to recommend women find a quote healthy balance in the pursuit of beauty, all while explaining how to maintain one's figure or how to drop a few pounds to be more attractive to others. The author claimed, quote if stout, a girl should eat as little as will satisfy her appetite, never allowing herself, however, to rise from the table hungry enter the tapeworm.
But before we meet this parasite, we're going to take a break forward from our sponsors. When we're back, we will talk about the unreasonable standard of beauty women were held to in the Victorian era and how women were perceived if they did not fit that mold.
We come back to criminalia. Let's start talking about tuberculosis and how it ties in to the tapeworm diet.
So during this time, ideal feminine beauty was based on the appearance of people who had tuberculosis, which was romanticized during the era. For those characteristics we mentioned earlier, a pale complexion, dilated pupils, and a frail thin physique. Tuberculosis had reached epidemic levels in Europe and in the United
States by the mid nineteenth century. The disease targets the lungs and also damages other organs, and before antibiotics were available, if you had it, it meant a slow death march. You died from what was then called consumption. During that time, consumption was believed to be caused by a hereditary susceptibility to it, as well as from unhealthy or so called bad air known as miasmas. It wasn't known to be infectious.
Published in nineteen oh nine, the book Tuberculosis, a treatise by American authors on its etiology, pathology, frequency, semiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and treatment, outlines the illness this way quote, A considerable number of patients have and have had for years, a delicate,
transparent skin, as well as fine silky hair. Those sparkling or dilated eyes and rosy cheeks and lips that were longed for were common in tuberculosis patients because their common characteristics of an ongoing low grade fever, but that wasn't known to the medical community at the time.
Desperate to achieve the coveted look, some Victorian women snacked on wafers made of arsenic to give themselves that bright eyed look as well as help them achieve a translucent complexion. Eyedrops of belladonna were used to dilate pupils, which also made eyes look bigger. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, can also cause blood kindness. Please don't try any of this at home, and as we keep going, none of it gets any healthier.
This unrealistic image society set for women to live up to, also used a woman's weight as a barometer of her intelligence, her character, her sexuality, and even her sanity. In Victorian society, excess weight was attributed to a woman's quote indolence of mind. Go ahead and embrace yourself, because the body shaming only gets worse from here. A nineteen hundred edition of The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette reported quote obesity always carries with
it physical and often mental weakness. In his eighteen ninety seven book The Female Offender, author Cizar Lambroso, who was, among other things, a eugenicist, claimed a connection between obesity and sex work, stating quote, this greater weight among prostitutes is confirmed by the notorious fact of the obesity of those who grow old in their vile trade and who
gradually become positive monsters of adipose tissue. Taking another leap, he goes on to conclude that quote female lunatics are far more often exaggeratedly fat than men.
A so called consumptive chic to cover the fashion world of the mid eighteen hundreds, as women sought to avoid being associated with all of that negative perception of carrying any weight at all. To look as thin as possible and achieve that ideal sixteen inch waist, women wore pointed corsets and generous skirts to call attention to tiny waists, and under those voluminous skirts, women appeared to glide as they moved, adding an otherworldly dimension to their delicate comportment.
Women also attempted to mimic the consumptive ethereal appearance by using white powder on their skin and by washing their skin with arsenic yes. Again, the poison.
Tuberculosis chic was hot. Take for instance, Marie Duplessi, a French Cortisan and Parisian celebrity. Today we would think of someone like her as an influencer. She was a striking Victorian beauty whose well known portrait by artist Edouar Vienna shows off her shiny black hair. Framing her oval face. Her eyes are sparkling, and she has pale ivory skin. Duplessi got that sought after look because she was afflicted with tuberculosis and she died from it at the age
of twenty three. To achieve that kind of beauty, women bathed in ammonia and they wore body crushing corsets. And some women chose more drastic measures, and that is ingesting tapeworms by swallowing tapeworm pills. Those pills contained beef tapeworm larvae. These larvae cysts would then hatch inside the body and voila weight loss was now in progress.
According to food historian Anny Gray Quote, during the nineteenth century, dieting became big business. Advertising was becoming more and more sophisticated, with more and more diet products being pedled. So let's talk how these tapeworms fit in to consumptive chek.
So, tapeworms, as we've been saying, are parasites. They're members of the phylum Anelda, also known as segmented worms, and that's a species that also includes pinworms and leeches. Segmented worms can break off segments of their body and as long as the head remains attached to its host, the creature can regrow more segments. Tapeworms have three main parts. The head, which is the part that attaches to intestines and ingests nutrients from your body, the neck, which can
regenerate its body. And then there's the rest of the worm, which consists of many segments that bear eggs. When those eggs hatch, they detach from the rest of the tapeworm and travel through the bloodstream to your muscles and to your brain, liver, and other organs, where they develop into cysts. If treatment to get rid of a tapeworm does not eliminate the head and neck, it may as well be useless because the entire worm can regrow.
Tapeworms generally don't cause more than minor symptoms, including things like lack of appetite, diarrhea, nausea, weight loss of course, and a craving for salty foods. But if those cysts grow in the spine or brain rather than the intestine, side effects could cause life threatening problems, including seizures, nerve pain, muscle weakness, and cognitive changes. If the central nervous system becomes infected, a person might experience hydrocephalous meningitis, and damage
to blood vessels in the brainstem or nerves. In some cases, if the tapeworm grows long enough, it could lead to obstruction of the bowel appendix or bialduct, which is a medical emergency. And on ava ridge, an adult tapeworm is about fifteen to thirty feet long. I mean, can you imagine in you're intestine on purpose, and they weren't temporary guests. You could host one for up to a decade. As long as your symptoms were mild, you might not even notice.
So with all of that delicious imagery and mind, we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back, we will talk about how one might remove a tapeworm before anti parasitic drugs. It was not especially easy.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about ways tapeworms were removed before modern medicine. But first let's talk about how maybe not a lot of those pills worked as advertised anyway.
When it comes down to both Victorian and modern dieters, because that tapeworm diet just won't go away. Stories about the effectiveness of this horrifying diet are actually kind of murky. Modern historians disagree on whether people actually ingested any real tapeworms from those pills, or whether the advertised products were
just simply placebos. Luckily, most of those tapeworm pills probably didn't work because most of them were probably inactive, or they just didn't even contain the active ingredient, which is a funny thing to call a tapeworm at all. One example, a product called Neutroids, marketed in the nineteen hundreds is a weight loss supplement sold by doctor R. Lincoln Graham of the Gram Sanatorium in New York City, contained ie at all, magnesium carbonate, starch, talc, and a trace of iron.
But you'll notice that ingredients list contains absolutely no mention of tapeworms.
But for those who were actually infected, there's still one thing we haven't talked about. Removing your tapeworm buckle up because some of these will probably make you squirm. The worm could theoretically leave your body on its own during a bowel movement. Segments of a tapeworm can break off and exit the body in your stool, and you would be able to see them. Pieces of tapeworm in your
stool usually look flat and rectangular. They would be white or a pale yellow, and they'd be the size of a grain of rice, although sometimes they remain joined together in a long chain of segments.
Today, if you find yourself in the unfortunate scenario where you have a tapeworm, your doctor would prescribe what are known as anthelmentic drugs, which treat parasitic infections. But before the mid twentieth century, when the first modern anti parasitic drugs hit the market, worms were treated in a few ways. Purgative plants such as wormwood were used to both kill the wor you were hosting and trigger your body to expel it with about of rather severe diarrhea.
Another popular method of removing your tapeworm involved holding a glass of milk at your mouth or near your anus, and then waiting for the worm to come out. Theoretically, it would head for that milk. Now, there is no proof that milk can coax or remove a parasite, but when it comes to folk remedies, it can be hard
to shake. And then there's this method. Terry Deary, in his book Horrible Histories Vile Victorians, describes a method invented by a doctor Myers of Sheffield, England, in which cylinders stuffed with food were inserted into a person's digestive tract. Patients were then instructed not to eat for a few days, so that the tapeworms looking for a meal would theoretically
be lured into those traps. Tapeworms would then be coaxed out of the body with the aforementioned milk method, and while a glass of milk wasn't really going to help, at least it was a fairly benign treatment in comparison, some people choked to death on these cylinders.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a better understanding of tuberculosis when in eighteen eighty two, Robert Coch announced that he discovered the bacteria that causes the disease. In eighteen sixty one, Louis Pasteur had introduced germ theory, a breakthrough that proved microscopic organisms invisible germs were a cause of infection rather than something like bad air.
Building on that, Koch's understanding of tuberculosis helped germ theory gain more legitimacy, and it also convinced both public health experts and physicians that tuberculosis was a contagious disease.
For those desperate to lose weight, whatever their motivation to do so, tapeworms maybe sounded more appealing or potentially quicker than things like changing your diet and exercise habits. The United States Food and Drug Administration officially banned tapeworm pills, but there's no ban on the unrealistic expectations of female beauty then or now, I think we need to drink to make this just wash away from.
I think so tia. But this comes with a bit of a secondary history lesson. Are you ready, let's do it. We mentioned one of the treatments was to consume wormwood. Yes, and I can't let a mention of wormwood go by and not talk about absence. Of course. So wormwood's scientific name is Artemisia absyntheum. That's where absinthe gets its name. It's an ornamental plant. It's native to Europe, although now
you can find it in other places. It has been used medicinally since all the way back to ancient Egypt. It was in the ebers Pyrus. It's also mentioned in the Bible. Pliny the Elder talked about it Juliette's wet nurse in Shakespeare's play speaks of weaning Juliet by putting wormwood on her person because the bitter taste made nursing unappealing.
But it didn't become an alcohol until the seventeen hundreds, when Pierre Ordinaire, who was a French doctor, is credited with coming up with the first absinthe recipe in his
book The Complete Body of Distilling. That was in seventeen thirty one, and it was still more than sixty years before absinthe was bottled as a commercial product, which was done by Henri Luis Perennaut, and once it was commercially available, it was a huge hit, so much so that cocktail hour in Paris got renamed le'overt which is the green hour.
And then absence spread from beyond France to the rest of Europe and then eventually to the US, and people really loved it, then they didn't, or some people loved it and some people did not. A lot of people got a legen addicted to it, and by the late nineteenth century it was really easy to find editorials talking about the dangers of absinthe and how it was fundamentally
evil and how it was going to ruin everybody. That wave of anti absent thinking was helped by doctors who had started to attribute a lot of issues to absinthe, including various mental illnesses which were all grouped under the nebulous umbrella of insanity, which made me think also of how some doctors who were horrible made strange and unscientific associations between carrying extra weight and being insane or whatnot.
And eventually they believed that they had isolated the specific problem ingredient, which was wormwood in absinthe, which of course contains a compound called thujone. Thujone is toxic, to be clear, but the assessment of absent that the dawn of the twentieth century wasn't accurate in terms of that theu jone being dangerous, because there were actually studies that started to come out talking about thu jon dangers and what it could do to you. That's kind of why it was medicinal.
It had enough toxicity that you could use it to do things like kill a tape.
Or kill a tape worm exactly.
And as the medical community and scientists started publishing papers, absence started getting banned. Belgium was the first to ban it in nineteen oh five, and then just ten years later, by nineteen fifteen, almost I think every European country except Spain had banned it. The US had also banned it, and it stayed banned for a long time.
It's interesting because that overlaps our time frame here with killing tape worms with wormwood.
Yeah, exactly. It really wasn't like until eighty years after it that people started looking at absinthe again and being like, wait, what wasn't it that was so bad and really kind of start to do analysis on whether it had actually been toxic, And when those analyzes were performed, it really became clear that the theu jone in absinthe really was just adding a little bit of bitter flavor and sometimes part of that green coloration we associate with it, but
there was nowhere near enough in it to be toxic. So that idea that the wormwood in absinthe was what
made it dangerous was completely unfounded. All of those problems that had been attributed to thujone and to absyinthe, it was really just run of the mill alcoholism in a lot of cases, and it was like the novel alcohol, so that's why people were choosing it, and in some cases I suspect there were also instances where people actually did have some form of mental illness that they were self medicating through heavy drinking because there was no one recognizing what the real problem was to treat.
Them, and no real treatment at the time.
Yeah, there was nothing to do, so like absinthe and wormwood kind of got this bad rap for no actual factual reason. By the way, that whole absinth causing hallucinations thing is debunked left and right. It's kind of one
of those two sided coins. Both the people that were into absinthe and the people that thought it was evil were kind of both perpetuating that myth because people that were really into it were like, it was amazing, it was mind altering, it was the best thing I've ever had, And people that thought it was evil were like, it will mess up your mind. It's gonna make you like they were saying the same thing but with different emphasis. So as all of this scientific information started to become
a parent, slowly those bands started to roll back. There are specific limits just in case on how much wormwood can be included in production of absinth, but you can buy it pretty readily almost anywhere. Now this has been your absent advocacy minute, and now we're going to drink some all right.
I like a little history lesson with my drink.
This is a drink that I'm calling beauty standards, and it is a really easy one because you make it in the glass. It shares some DNA with a mule. There are times when you do not want to directly pour your alcohol and your mixing ingredients over ice, because the ice starts to melt very quickly and dilute. In the case of absinthe, I think it's fine you would normally if you order an absinth in a bar, they're
gonna dilute it with water anyway. That's what that whole sugar cube drop thing is going on when you get one. So you're gonna put your ice, a good amount of ice in your glass or your cup, whatever you're using. You're gonna pour in an ounce of absinthe, a half ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce of violet syrup, and then you're gonna top that with two to four ounces of ginger beer and just give it a stir. The violet syrup and the absinthe. It's like drinking the
most beautiful bouquet in the world. Like all of the herbaceous flavors of absinthe really come out, and the violet it softens the edges of everything. It's so yummy and delicious. I would like one right now.
That's in a great list of ingredients that sounds like a yummy drink.
Violet syrup is one of those things. If you don't have it, I recommend getting some. You can make it. It's a little bit tricky, so I recommend buying that one, or at least I find it tricky. Somebody else would be like what, it's easy, and every time I recommend ordering some because it's just one of those syrups that's like it adds to your bar cart or your backbar, whatever you're using, like just this little like secret weapon that you can use to make drinks feel a little elevated.
And if when you use it in lieu of simple syrup, you can also throw it on, you know, a scone or a cookie and it's I love violet syrup and everything. The mocktail for this one is so easy. You're going to do the exact same thing, but instead of using any absynthe you will use like a half ounce instead of an ounce of an anis or a licorice syrup.
That's it. Bump it down because at that point that liquorice flavor gets really intense at a full ounce, so you don't need that much, especially because you then have two syrups going on. So I would in that case probably also lean towards the heavier end of your ginger beer port. That is the beauty standard, which is easy to achieve.
Delicious and easy to achieve.
I drink too, finding the beauty and everyone and not making people do foolish things to stop being themselves and become something else in the interest of pleasing somebody else's gaze.
Right, going so far as to ingest.
A, don't danguer your.
Health to look good to other people.
Listen. You can be as close to the perfect level of beauty standard as you want, but if you're sick to get there, or if you don't feel good about any of it, it's not worth it. I promise. I am very grateful that you have all hung out and listened to us and listened to me yammer on about my absent feelings.
And stayed through the disgusting episode out of tamwork.
We needed some fun talk to shake off all of that holding milk up to your orifices discussion I'm not interested in, but we are so grateful that you spent this time with us, and we will be right back here again next week with another story of snake oil, which hopefully will involve less anous talk and another drink that definitely won't if I have anything to say about it. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
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