4

The Ancient Greeks Used To Sacrifice "Ugly" People

The ancient Greeks were obsessed with physical perfection, which made things ... not ideal if you weren't a walking benchmark for physical perfection.

Between the 8th and 5th centuries BCE, the Greeks would conduct a ritual known as pharmakos during times of plague or famine, wherein each town would nominate its fugliest resident to take one for the team, as it were. This person would be wined and dined with the best foods on offer, before a mob of locals beat them senseless and drove them out of town.

Giampietro Campana di Cavelli Collection“A uniformly beautiful population is the only thing that can please our enormously chinned, brow-ridge-less gods.”

Those were the lucky ones. As with all local traditions, pharmakos was different from town to town. Some would merely drive their uggos out, while others would murder them via stoning, burning, or volcano (which is kind of both stoning and burning, come to think of it). It was a brutal ritual that targeted all equa- oh wait, the rich were exempt.

The ritual became more and more popular as time went on. While at first it would only be carried out if times were lean, it eventually became an annual ceremony that, like the Purge, worked to alleviate social tensions and "avoided the possibility of a chaotic and uncontrolled bloodshed among the members of the society." Well, the poor members of society. Nobody was bothered by a rich goblin, apparently.

Related: 5 Awful Realities Of Life With An 'Invisible Illness'

3

A Nazi Eugenics Program Was Kick-Started By One Terrible Father

The Holocaust didn't solely target the Jewish populations of Europe. Its considerable brunt was also brought to bear on gay people, the Roma, POWs, communists, and the disabled -- the latter under a program known as Aktion T4.

2

Wealthy Baltimore Families Used Asylum Patients As Slaves

By the 1920s, the U.S. still considered black people subhuman, but not so subhuman that it was OK to enslave them. It's a low bar by which to measure progress, sure, but when those are basically the only bars you have, you take what you can get. But rich families in Baltimore had a problem: They still really wanted to own people. So they decided to take matters into their hands and burglarize the local asylum for housekeeping staff.

Somehow, the idea that this wasn't a temp agency was slow to sink in.

Known as the "Rosewood girls" scandal, the central figure was a shady lawyer with a shadier name: Harry B. Wolf. (As if you needed another hint to not trust an old-timey lawyer.) He represented a suspiciously large number of women "released" from Baltimore's Rosewood Asylum, who were then perused and bought by rich families like they were at a cattle market. It's estimated that between 1911 and 1933, over 166 patients left Rosewood under these circumstances, most of whom disappeared with little-to-no notice given to their real families -- provided their real families hadn't abandoned them to rot in the asylum in the first place.

The girls were then expected to be slaves for their benevolent saviors until the end of time, or until their masters grew tired of them. As the guy who busted this racket described, "Many of the women soon became dissatisfied with their maids and expressed great astonishment that the girls seemed 'stupid' and 'slow' ... this discovery, however, did not deter them from ordering another girl when they got rid of the one they had."

There was also widespread abuse of the girls. ("One girl placed in the home of a physician was so poorly supervised that she went through nine months of an illegitimate pregnancy and gave birth to a child without anyone noticing it; the 'supervising' wife of the doctor ... found the newborn baby in her cupboard.") One matron hired and fired 35+ girls, as if she was buying and dumping IKEA furniture on the street, not human beings. When someone tracked down 102 of the 166 enslaved patients, they found that 11 had died from neglect, 17 were suffering from some kind of infectious disease (e.g. syphilis, tuberculosis), 29 were forced into prostitution, six were in prison, and only eight had been re-institutionalized.

1

Southerners Are Stereotyped As Stupid Because Of Hookworm Infection

To this day, we'd estimate that half of all Southern characters in pop culture are inbred idiots. What's the deal with that?

Well, there are two deals: hookworms and general human shittiness.

Kateryna_Kon /Adobe StockYou may have noticed that the second one is something of a theme today.

For nearly 300 years, the American South was ravaged by a pandemic of hookworm, a parasite which causes abdominal pain, tiredness, severe weight loss, and serious impairment of both mental and physical abilities -- the latter symptom being why hookworm was nicknamed "the germ of laziness." At its peak, 40 percent of all people living between Texas and West Virginia were infected.

And so the stereotype of the "shiftless, lazy, good-for-nothing idiot" Southerner was born. There's evidence to suggest that hookworm is dying out these days, although it's thought that deeply rural holdout populations might still be living with it. Considering that it's taken pop culture up until, like, yesterday to realize that women are people too, we won't hold on for better depictions of Southerners anytime soon.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

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