Here are some historical facts I found incredibly disturbing.
The earliest form of mouthwash was urine. In ancient Rome, bottled Portuguese urine was used to disinfect and whiten teeth.
The Pre-Raphaelites loved the paint color "mummy brown," but it was actually made with the remains of Egyptian mummies.
Trepanning was the earliest surgical procedure, where a hole was drilled into a patient's skull. It was used in many civilizations treating everything from headaches to mental illness.
Perhaps most infamously, Prince Philip of Orange had his head drilled 17 times.
It wasn't until the late 1980s that we accepted that babies feel pain. For a long time, operations on babies were done without anesthesia.
Allegedly, the Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II covered his servants in honey so that pesky flies would be attracted to them and not him.
Because women couldn't properly breathe in corsets, they were more likely to get pneumonia and tuberculosis. Corsets also caused serious muscle atrophy, so some women had to wear them just to remain upright.