But of course, all good things come to an end. Flowers bloom, caterpillars turn into beautiful butterflies and boys go through the often traumatizing experience of puberty.

Just ask Macaulay Culkin.

But for those boys whose sopranos were sweet enough to make a mob boss weep, a minor surgery could preserve their voice, joining them to the ranks of the castrati. In fact, 70 percent of stage performers in the 17th century were castrati.

A fad that reappeared in the 1970s.

And how did one become an illustrious member of the castrati? You already guessed, you just won't admit it to yourself. It was via the process of cutting blood supply to the testicles, or more commonly amputating them altogether.

How did they perform such an invasive--and not to mention traumatizing--surgery on a six- to 12-year-old kid? By giving them a bath. They simply soaked them in a tub of water to soften them up, and then performed the surgery when they were rendered unconscious. We assume the unconscious part came from telling the seven-year-old that they were not, in fact, receiving candy for this public bathing but actually getting their balls chopped off.

Then castrati might hope for a good 10 year run as a performer, after which the boy would only be 17 and rethinking the long term strategy of a castration career. Of course, settling down and getting married wasn't an option, unless the boy could find that one in a million girl turned on by non-existent erections.

I think I just felt- no nevermind. Just a breeze.

Eventually, castratis fell out of fashion in the late 1700s, not because of the ridiculously brutal violence visited upon little boys, but because the Italian soap opera plots they performed in became too silly to watch. The audiences didn't mind the castrations; it was the authenticity of the scripts that turned them off. Hear that, M. Night Shyamalan? No amount of castrated boys could save your films from sucking.

From ages as young as four, children were employed in the art of hurrying: pulling giant sled loads of coal through tiny shafts. Children made perfect carriers because their short stature allowed them to crawl around two foot tunnels in the bowels of the Earth for 12 hours a shift. You might wonder why midgets were not employed. Because midgets are people too, jerk.

Evil, evil, little people.

Oh, and did we mention the children were often forced to do the work naked? Perhaps clothes were forbidden because loose articles might catch on shaft walls. Or perhaps the idea of a fully-clothed child crawling on their belly in an ink black hole deep underground came off as too dignified.

The fact is, there was no physical need for mine shafts to be constructed that small, and therefore no need to employ children. Building shafts over 24-inches wide just cost more. It's simple Supply and Demand: people kept supplying disposable children, and mining companies kept demanding those kids to shimmy their little asses down the scary, dark hell mouth.

Considered the lowliest position on the boat, a Loblolly's day included serving food and cleaning medical instruments. Oh, and cleaning up blood and severed limbs.

See, the Loblolly played the roles of janitor, waiter and nurse on a ship. The position's name derived from the name of a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge, perhaps with a bit of meat or some vegetables in it that the boy was in charge of serving. The Loblolly stew was also called spoon meat but likely no one wanted a "Spoon Meat Boy" on board.

First, there was the simple job of cleaning, which sounds like fine entry-level work, except it mainly consisted of cleaning up motion-sick rider's barf and throwing sand over the blood and guts covering the deck during a battle.

"Mind the wet floor, gentlemen. Don't slip and hurt yourselves."

But even that had to be less traumatizing than the Loblolly's role as assistant to the ship surgeon, considering this wasn't exactly the days of blue scrubs and sterile operating rooms. The job included collecting up amputated limbs, pouring hot tar on wounds and cleaning bed pans.

We're going to guess that there were more than a few "mercy" killings.

And the reward at the end of a good day's work was a punch in the face. Probably.

You've probably heard somebody use the term "whipping boy" to mean "scapegoat" or a guy who repeatedly takes the punishment for somebody else's screw-up. But once again, a term that serves as a ridiculous mental image in today's society was real life in the Middle Ages.

It was an odd time.

Being born in medieval Europe was like playing the world's worst game of womb-roulette. That's just like Russian roulette, if you replaced the bullet with a life of poverty and pestilence--and instead of only one guy at the table getting hit, you all did. Surprise! Live to 30 and you were a hero; live to 50 and you were burned at the stake for being a witch.

"He's trying to blow out the flames. Get him!"

Unless you were popped out by a queen and had a penis. Life as a prince was pretty sweet. Then there were the rags-to-riches stories of the lucky common boy chosen to live a life of luxury with the prince, employed as a full time buddy. Kind of like Pretty Woman, but replace Julia Roberts with Danny DeVito. And for this privileged life, all the "lucky" boy had to do was take physical beatings for all the prince's wrongdoings.

Back in the 17th century, people believed the body of a prince, like that of the king, was sacred and could not be harmed. So what to do when the sacred vessel was acting like a royal prick? The answer: Whip the prince's friend while he watched.

The practice started with King James the First, who instructed a peasant whipped for his son Charles's crimes--clearly demonstrating both his authority and complete lack of understanding of little boys' sociopathic nature. While the royalty assumed the young prince would learn his lesson after watching his only companion take violence for the prince's own misdeeds, more likely the royal shit assumed the position of a unfuckwithable little tyrant with no regard for the pain and suffering of others. But history clearly shows this is just a phase they grow out of toward becoming benevolent and perfectly reasonable rulers.

But hey, look at those snazzy dressers! At least they got to be the Don Draper of the huddled masses, almost always wearing top hats and tails. They were probably so smug, striding around in their fancy clothes that they got as cast offs from funeral directors. Then when the black lung or whatever disease made kids fall down chimneys came for them, they didn't even have to change clothes!