Medieval bloodletting has been written about before at the gimcrack, but there’s always more to come…..

“For the physician of the Middle Ages, bleeding became his “take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” Extant text detail the hazards of  ’withholding blood’ and men, children and the elderly were profusely bled. Menstruating women were often spared the procedure as nature already provided them with a monthly detox. Bleeding haemorrhoids became an ailment to be desired.

Diagnosis was also influenced by astrology. Medical charts informed physicians what not to do for people born under a certain star sign.

Aries: Avoid incisions in the head and face and cut no vein in the head.

Taurus: Avoid incisions in the neck and throat and cut no veins there.

Gemini: Avoid incisions in the shoulders, arms or hands and cut no vein.

Cancer: Avoid incisions in the breasts, sides, stomach and lungs and cut no vein that goes to the spleen.

Leo: Avoid incisions of the nerves, lesions of the sides and bones, and do not cut the back either by opening and bleeding.

Virgo: Avoid opening a wound in the belly and in the internal parts.

Libra: Avoid opening wounds in the umbellicus and parts of the belly and do not open a vein in the back or do cupping.

Scorpio: Avoid cutting the testicles and anus.

Sagittarius: Avoid incisions in the thighs and fingers and do not cut blemishes and growths.

Capricorn: Avoid cutting the knees or the veins and sinews in these places.

Aquarius: Avoid cutting the knees or the veins and veins in these places.

Pisces: Avoid cutting the feet.

We’ve also discussed the popularity of the enema, known as a clyster, especially when administered by a limonadier des posterieur. In fact there was a time when I thought I was writing about them far too often, as you may remember if you ever read this post.

Administering an enema was considered a high art

“The limonadier, as a skilled tactician, was to be gentle and discreet and not take the place by storm, but like a trained sharp-shooter, is prepared for action and fires as soon as he catches sight of the enemy.”

The clyster was a like a daily vitamin pill, facial and high fibre breakfast. Nobility and royalty typically took three or four a day. Through advertisements and word of mouth, clysters acquired the reputation of increasing sexual potency and curing impotence.

Costing more, sexual enemas were known as “restaurants“. After receiving a restaurant, elderly women were said to turn skittish; men of all ages, fiery. They were indulged in regularly by the French cardinal Richelieu. When Richelieu married for the third time at age 85, he announced that if the marriage with his young bride  produced no children, it would not be his fault since he still took sexual clysters, as he did until his death at 92.

When Louis Xlll of France was ill, Richelieu supervised the doctoring; within a period of 6 months, the ailing king was subjected to 47 bleedings, 215 oral purgatives and 312 clysters - two enemas every day except holidays

We’ve reported on smell before at the gimcrack here and here and here. But there’s still more to be found at the Social Issues Research Centre

“Among the Amazonian Desana, for example, all members of a tribal group a believed to share a similar odour. Marriage is only allowed between persons of different odours, so spouses must be chosen from other tribal groups. This belief is expressed in rituals involving the exchanges of goods with different odours: one group will present the other with a gift of meat, for example, and receive fish in return. Some rituals involve the exchange of differently scented ants.

image found here

The Batek Negrito of the Malay Peninsula take the same taboo on the odour-mixing of close relatives a stage further: not only is sexual intercourse between those of similar odour prohibited, but even sitting too close to one another for too long is considered dangerous. Any prolonged mixing of similar personal odours is believed to cause disease in the people involved and in any children they may conceive.

The dangers of odour-mixing are even more extreme for another Malay Peninsula people, the Temiar. The Temiar believe that each person has an odour-soul, located in the lower back. If you pass too closely behind a person, the odour-soul is disturbed and mingles with your body, causing disease. This must be prevented by calling out ‘odour, odour’ whenever you approach a person from behind, so that the odour-soul is forewarned of the intrusion.

For the Dogon people of Mali, odour and sound are believed to be intrinsically related because both travel on air – the Dogon speak of ‘hearing’ a smell. In addition, speech itself is believed to be scented: good speech – with appropriate grammar and pronunciation – smells pleasant (in Dogon terms, this means an odour of oil and cooking, which are highly valued), while nasal, indistinct or ungrammatical speech has an unpleasant, stagnant odour. Ten-year-old children who persist in making mistakes of grammar or pronunciation will have their noses pierced as a corrective.

Western notions of aesthetically pleasing fragrances are by no means universal. For the cattle-raising Dassanetch of Ethiopia, no scent is more beautiful than the odour of cows. The association of this scent with social status and fertility is such that the men wash their hands in cattle urine and smear their bodies with manure, while the women rub butter into their heads, shoulders and breasts to make themselves smell more attractive.

The Dogon of Mali would find these customs incomprehensible. For the Dogon, the scent of onion is by far the most attractive fragrance a young man or woman can wear. They rub fried onions all over their bodies as a highly desirable perfume.

I highly recommend visiting this site and reading more about the perfume box rituals of Arab countries

(Myra May) Belle Starr was born near Carthage, Missouri in 1848. Legend would have us believe she was a romantic beautiful Bandit Queen but this source tells us otherwise

“She has been described as ‘bony and flat chested with a mean mouth; hatchet faced; gotch-toothed tart.’ In her later years, she was a companion to known thieves and felons, but it is doubtful she ever did more than steal horses and provide a haven for fugitives.

image found here

Belle’s first husband and father of her two children, John Reed, was shot escaping arrest for murder and robbery. Her second (or possibly third) husband was a handsome three quarter Cherokee Indian named Sam Starr, son of the outlaw Tom Starr.

Tom Starr

The Starrs were attending a friend’s Christmas party on December 17, when Sam encountered an old enemy whom he shot him dead, but not before being fatally wounded himself.  Belle then took up with an adopted son of old Tom Starr, 24-year-old Bill July (alias Jim Starr), a Creek Indian. July moved in with Belle, her daughter Pearl and her son Eddie; he was her last husband.

image of Pearl Starr found here

Shortly afterwards, Bill July Starr was arrested, indicted and released on bail for horse stealing. Then in July 1888, young Eddie was charged with horse theft, giving him something in common with his stepfathers.

Belle Starr was shot dead in February 1889 as she returned home from a party. The suspects were many and included a neighbour she had quarreled with, her husband who had a secret younger mistress, her daughter whom she had tricked into giving up her fiancé and her son whom she had disciplined with a bullwhip. No one was ever convicted.

A totally different Belle, but one who still had Indian associations, was Silver Belle.

Silver Belle was the ’spirit guide’ of the American medium, Ethel Post-Parrish. In 1953, 81 people believed they witnessed ectoplasm materializing out of Ethel’s body in a smoky white cloud to form the shape of a beautiful woman.

“The ectoplasm will retract back into the medium’s body, however, not all of it will return; leaving the medium very exhausted. This is why Joshua did not leave the tent in Exodus 33:11. Joshua was the medium for Jehovah to materialize and “speak with Moses face to face.”

I have no idea what ectoplasmic Belle had in common with Joshua, Jehovah or Moses, but it’s a direct quote from the website and is possibly helps to explain why Ethel has such bad posture in all her photographs….

Our third Belle was a serial killer born in 1859.

It is estimated that she killed more than 40 people over several decades. Belle Gunness married a Norwegian man in Chicago and soon after they opened a confectionery store. The business venture was not a success and within a year the store had burnt down in mysterious circumstances. Insurance money was paid and the money was used to purchase a home in Austin. This was destroyed, again by a mysterious fire, in 1898; the couple collected insurance money and purchased yet another home. Within two years her husband had died, on July 30th 1900, the only day that two life insurance policies on him overlapped. She applied for insurance money of $8,500 dollars on the day after his funeral.

She used the money to buy a farm in Indiana and moved there with the couple’s three daughters, one of whom was adopted. It was later established that Gunness and Sorenson had four offspring together, but that two had died in infancy; suffice to say that those two children were also insured and that it is now believed that they too were poisoned.

Belle then met a Norwegian named Peter Gunness who lived in her village (it was then that she acquired her famous surname) and they married on April 1st 1902. By this stage she was working a lot quicker, within a week of the ceremony Peter’s infant daughter had died whilst in the house alone with Belle. By the end of the same year Peter had a “tragic accident”, this time a sausage grinding machine had fallen from a high shelf onto his head, killing him instantly.

Belle’s bridgework found here

In 1906 her adopted daughter Jennie fell out of sight, Gunness told curious villagers that Jennie had been sent to a finishing school in Los Angeles. Jennie had in fact been killed and her body was later to be found on Belle’s farm. At the same time Gunness placed an ad in the matrimonial columns of all Chicago daily newspapers and those of other cities, she stated that she was a widow who desired to make the acquaintance of a gentleman with equal wealth to join fortunes. The result was a train of suitors, armed with wallets full of cash and deeds to their properties. Each would never be seen again, whilst Belle would deposit regular large sums of money into her bank account……. read more about how the bodies were discovered here

image found here

ok so it’s not a corset. If you want to register a complaint please form an orderly line. We’ve had the annual Gimcrack Christmas party today and I’m feeling a little cranky and tired. It must be the Director of Nursing’s fault as she made the punch this year and I think she was a little heavy handed with the vodka……

The artwork on the wall in the middle photo (magenta#1) is by Tim Schultz

(and if you look closely at the last photo you can see part of a 12″ scar on my right hip. I’m very fond of that scar)

all photos taken by syncopated eyeball

Canadian Charles Millar died in 1928, leaving behind an unusual will

Charles Chaplin NOT Charles Millar

Millar left lucrative shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to men who were strong opponents of gambling. He gave equal shares in a vacation home to three fellow lawyers who intensely disliked each other. He gave shares of the O’Keefe Brewery Company to every Protestant minister and every Orange Lodge in Ontario, all strong supporters of prohibition. The fact that the company was owned by Catholics only added to the discomfort felt by the “heirs”.

However, it was Clause 9 of the will that drew the most interest. By it, Millar left the remainder of his money to the Toronto woman who could produce the most children, certified by registrations under the Vital Statistics Act, in the ten year period following the date of his death.

image of Keys quadruplets going to visit Dionne quadruplets found here

Contestants, some of whom became close friends, were quickly identified and became overnight celebrities. Staid Ontario papers began covering topics often verboten in the past – birth control, abortion, illegitimate children, and divorce. The legal system became involved.

Visconti triplets found at bestfreegaypornsite (warning: nude men)

On October 31, 1936, the contest officially ended in a tie. Four women, Anna Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Macclean, had nine children each. They were each awarded $125,000 (US $1,500,000 today). Two other women would have also tied but were eliminated. Pauline Clarke had nine children but admitted that one was by a man not her husband. Lillian Kenney had actually had twelve babies, but several had died and she was unable to prove that they were not stillborn. As a consolation prize, each was given $12,500.

The image above is of The Fultz sisters, the first black quadruplets born in the USA. You can read their story here. The babies were delivered by Dr Fred Klenner, the father of Fritz Klenner

Years later, Klenner would gain fame as an early advocate of massive vitamin-C therapy, and then infamy as the father of Fritz Klenner, the delusional, kissing-cousin survivalist behind the made-for-TV murder-suicides of 1985.

It seems I’ve been missing out on something… the out of body astral sex experience….

Astral sex is a human-nature complication of consciousness and bioenergetic incarnation. In real life, sexual thoughts and fantasy type sexual imagery pop into peoples minds all the time, privately and harmlessly. These are perfectly natural and do no harm whatsoever.

Jeanne Moreau

In the sensitive out-of-body environment though, where projectors really are what they think, thoughts are not quite so private and harmless. The sex instinct is one of the most powerful primal urges and, like all strong emotions, can cause serious energetic problems if allowed to flourish unchecked in the sensitive out-of-body environment.

La Notte

A real time sexual encounter, accidental or deliberate, always has the same outcome. It results in almost instantaneous orgasm for the physical body of the initiator. The same thing can also often happen to the initiator’s passive or unwary sexual partner as well, when another projector is involved.

Once real time sex is triggered between two projectors, a strong two-way energetic connection forms. This can cause them both to experience uncontrollable sexual arousal which may be completely out of character for either of them. In most cases there is no deliberate intent on the part of the initiator of the real-time sex act; only a few stray sexual thoughts gone awry

image by Toyen

Real-time sex does not require physical close contact as it does in the physical dimension. Sex can be initiated and consummated from a distance of several meters or more, with the two projectors involved never getting any closer.

Valerie Leon

Because of this enhanced sensitivity, genital sensations experienced during real-time sex encounters are highly abnormal and feel nothing at all like they do in the physical dimension. The nearest I can describe this abnormal sensation is that both projectors feel themselves expanding into and becoming their oversensitive genitals.

A male real time sex initiator perceives the rapid extrusion of a giant penis-like limb as extending from his genital area. He then flows into and becomes this penis-like limb. This extends rapidly and deeply penetrates the body of his real-time sex partner in the genital area, even from several meters distance.

It rises up through and fills his partner’s whole body. The initiator has the sensation that the inside of his partner’s body is made of dense, warm, energetically tingling and throbbing, ultra-erotic jelly.

Let’s play 6 degrees of separation with Annie Besant, Charles Leadbetter, Charles Manson, Mary Ann MacLean, Mary Tyler Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson… the connections are diabetes, animal rights, cults and people who travel with an entourage.

“Sugar Ray Robinson was the pioneer of boxing’s bigger-than-life entourages, including a secretary, barber, masseur, voice coach, a coterie of trainers, beautiful women, a dwarf mascot and lifelong manager George Gainford. When Robinson returned to Paris in 1962—where he was a national hero—to get him to cross the seas the French had to promise to bring over his masseur, his hairdresser, a guy who whistled while he trained, and his trademark pink Cadillac. In his later years he was diagnosed with diabetes and Alzheimer’s.”

image found here

The actress Mary Tyler Moore is well known for her charity work and various political causes, particularly on behalf of Animal rights and Diabetes.  In the photo below she is shown with the editor of Process magazine.

The Process Church of the Final Judgement was founded by Mary Ann MacLean and Robert DeGrimston Moore. Several sources report her as having once been married to Sugar Ray Robinson, but an equal number refute this claim.

In 1965, Compulsions Analysis, a derivative of Scientology, became the Process Church of the Final Judgement. The following year, Mary Ann, Robert, about 30 of their entourage and six Alsatian dogs travelled to Mexico City and down the Yucatan coast to the hippie paradise of Xtul before returning to London. Processeans hit the streets asking for donations. Mary Ann was a fanatical anti-vivisectionist; cult members were told to say the money was going to ‘animal welfare,’ although most of it landed in the DeGrimstons’ pocket. They also set up a church in Cole Street, San Francisco where they were close neighbours with Charles Manson.

Charles Manson was interested in Scientology and the Church of the Final Judgement. Two Processeans visited Manson in jail; Manson later contributed a stream-of-unconsciousness rant for the Process “Death” issue, calling death “total awareness, closing the circle, bringing the soul to now.” DeGrimston wrote of Satan and Christ coming together; to those in the know, that was just another name for Charlie.

Annie Besant also lived in London where she supported humanitarian causes, mysteries and occult teachings. In 1902, she and six others journeyed to Paris where she became a member of the Theosophical Society and met Charles W Leadbeater who convinced her she was a clairvoyant.

“In 1906 Leadbeater suddenly became the centre of controversy when it emerged that he was sleeping with young boys and engaging in mutual masturbation with them — Leadbeater explained that he had been offering them advice and guidance in order to keep them from sleeping with women”

more images of Annie Besant and C W Leadbeater here

We’ve talked about old anti-masturbation devices before at the gimcrack. Several of them are mentioned in this article which also features a couple that are new to nursemyra such as the inventions of Frank Orth and Joseph Lee

Frank Orth came up with this device, as bulky as a major kitchen appliance, which spoke directly to prevalent belief that as the body heated up under covers it became more sexually responsive.

The motor drove a fan that forced cooling air down a tube into rubber drawers fitted with circulation bladders.”

Orth also held a patent on a water-based cooling system. “Each of these thermal harness systems was installed permanently in the bedroom, like a piece of furniture. At night, the user would fit his body into the device and then, along with the trailing straps, wires and flexible pipes, slide under the covers.”

Mr. Joseph Lee engineered this beauty, a harness you wore to bed that sensed an erection, which activated an electrical circuit that could be hooked up to your choice of a phonograph, gramophone or graphophone and thus awaken the endangered sleeper with music or an inspirational talk.

Harnessing your family jewels to a gramophone might sound like a strange idea but at least it wouldn’t be as painful as some of the anti-rape devices mentioned in this article.  Ever mindful of my readers delicate sensibilities, I will only include a quote about the least terrifying.

The tamest, created by Joel D Rumph and Lynda K Warren, would inject the penis with a fast-working sedative. What you then do with the comatose attacker lying on top of you, the patent does not say. Indeed, all the designs display very basic problems, explaining why none seems to have been produced.

James H Bowen of Philadelphia came up with this bright idea in 1889

In the aesthetic design of his device, he appears to have drawn inspiration from the restraining mechanisms of horse bridles. A little metal hat was placed over the head of the penis, with small chains on either side dropping down to the end of spring-loaded clips. The clips were then securely clasped to tufts of pubic hair at the base of the penis.

When a nocturnal erection began, and the penis enlarged beyond the length of the chains, the pubic hair was pulled, causing the kind of pain guaranteed to wake the naughty dreaming sleeper who was, according to Bowen, “thereby enabled to prevent or check the discharge.”

Back in the 18th century, gentlemen advertised for love in the Maryland Gazette

“Wanted, a young woman who is between 15 and 22, who can take care of a single man’s linens and otherwise attend to him, in case of indisposition, to make tea and occasionally amuse him with a tete a tete. As a very genteel salary will be given, ’tis expected that the lady will be likely as to person, and cheerful in her temper; such a one will not be offended at this manner of address.

“The advertiser is serious, and in earnest. He hopes an idle curiosity will not lead anyone to be impertinent. A letter directed to D.M.L to be left at the printing office will be duly attended to. The utmost honour and secrecy may be depended upon.”

Here’s one from the Daily Advertiser

“Wanted by a young gentleman, a lady of 18 to 25 years old, well bred and with a fortune of not less than £5,000; sound in wind and limb, 5′4″ without shoes; not fat but not too thin;

sweet breath and good teeth; without conceit or affectation; not too chatty and not quarrelsome, but yet with character to pay back a score; generous; not over fashionable; the sort of person who can make parties gay; who can keep her husband’s secrets so he can open his heart to her without restraint, and can with a light heart reduce the budget if necessity requires.”

In 1795 a Bristol paper carried this poetic advertisement

A gentleman needs a companion to journey with him towards matrimony; his intention is to depart as swiftly as possible, to leave the main roads and highways and to stroll in the paths in the woods of love.

His fellow traveller must be healthy, not too fat because that would make the journey troublesome, and to while away the hours of the marriage state, the chattier the better.”

all photos were taken by syncopated eyeball

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