The year a practice gets outlawed doesn’t tell you much. The year before does, when it was still legal, still common, still defended by reasonable people who would have found the objections melodramatic. Most of history’s most disturbing rules weren’t imposed by monsters. They were maintained by ordinary people operating inside a set of ideas that made those rules feel logical, even necessary.
Public executions drew crowds. Surgeons drilled into living skulls and called it medicine. Children breathed coal dust for twelve hours a day and the law called it employment. These weren’t fringe practices or underground cruelties. They were institutions, with their own internal justifications, their own defenders, their own paper trails.
Children in the Mines
The Industrial Revolution created an enormous demand for factory and mine workers. Children were ideal employees: they could be paid less, their smaller bodies fit into tight spaces, and they were far less likely to organize against their conditions. In the early 1800s, this was simply policy.
By 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of sixteen. Children worked in factories, mines, and agricultural gangs, often pulling the same long hours as adults. According to a 2025 overview of American child labor, Britain passed one of the first protective laws in 1833, making it illegal for children under nine to work in factories, meaning those nine and older remained entirely unprotected. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally set a national minimum wage and placed meaningful limits on child labor for the first time.
The “Ugly Laws”
From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, so-called “ugly laws” banned “unsightly” people from public places across the United States. San Francisco became the first city in 1867 to make it a crime for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” to “expose himself or herself to public view.”
Chicago’s 1881 version of the ordinance specified a fine of one dollar for each offense. The laws specifically targeted disabled people who appeared in public spaces, with so-called “poorhouse clauses” that banished those who couldn’t pay fines to jails or almshouses. National Geographic reports that some of these laws were even justified as a public health measure, based on the mistaken belief that seeing someone with a disability could literally make a healthy person sick. The last recorded American arrest under an ugly law occurred in 1974, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Coverture: The Law That Erased Married Women
Coverture was a legal doctrine in English common law under which a married woman’s legal existence was considered merged with that of her husband. Upon marriage, she had no independent legal standing of her own. As the National Women’s History Museum records, the jurist William Blackstone was direct about what this meant: “husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”
This doctrine prevented women from owning property, entering contracts, or filing lawsuits without their husband’s permission. A woman could earn wages and her husband could legally take them. She could inherit property and he could sell it without asking her. Coverture gave husbands control over their wives’ property and legal custody over children in cases of divorce or separation. Certain aspects of coverture survived as late as the 1960s in some states.
Lobotomies as Standard Treatment
Lobotomy, the surgical procedure that involved severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, was once hailed as a breakthrough treatment for mental illness before being recognized as one of medicine’s most catastrophic chapters. The procedure was sold to a desperate public and a desperate medical establishment as a cure for schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and what were broadly called “behavioral problems.”
Its originator was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s, with American neurologist Walter Freeman alone performing or supervising more than 3,500 procedures by the late 1960s. A large proportion of lobotomized patients exhibited reduced tension or agitation, but many also showed apathy, passivity, lack of initiative, poor concentration, and a generally decreased depth and intensity of their emotional response to life. The procedure was often performed on people who could not provide meaningful informed consent, including children and institutionalized patients. The practice gradually fell out of favor beginning in the mid-1950s, when antipsychotics and other medications proved far more effective.
Debtor’s Prison
Failing to repay a debt is not a crime today. For most of Western history, it was. People who couldn’t repay their debts could be sent to prison, which created an impossible loop. A person owing money would be jailed. Jailed, they couldn’t work. Not working, they couldn’t earn. Not earning, they couldn’t repay. Families lost breadwinners to imprisonment for debts that could never be cleared from a cell.
Charles Dickens drew directly from personal experience when he wrote about it: his own father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in London in 1824, when Dickens was twelve years old. The practice in the United States lingered longer than many people realize, with individual states abolishing it at different points across the nineteenth century. Most countries have since eliminated debtors’ prisons entirely, recognizing that financial hardship should not result in incarceration.
Foot Binding
For centuries, some families in China practiced foot binding on young girls. Their feet were tightly wrapped from childhood to keep them as small as possible, because tiny feet were considered attractive and a marker of status. The process permanently deformed the feet and caused severe pain that often lasted a lifetime. The practice is thought to have originated among court dancers during the Five Dynasties period in 10th-century China and became popular among the elite during the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), persisting for roughly a thousand years.
At its height, a woman without bound feet faced serious social consequences, including difficulty finding a husband and exclusion from the upper social tier entirely. The bound foot, called a “golden lotus,” became so normalized that its absence, not its presence, was the mark of scandal. China formally banned foot binding in 1912, though the practice continued in rural areas for decades afterward.
Bloodletting as Universal Medicine
For roughly 2,500 years, across Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and into the 19th-century American frontier, the go-to treatment for almost any illness was draining blood from the patient’s body. Fevers, infections, mental illness, headaches, seizures: the diagnosis barely mattered. The treatment was bleeding. Physicians used lancets, leeches, and specially designed cups to remove what they believed was excess or “bad” blood causing an imbalance of humors in the body.
The idea was built on a coherent internal logic: the four bodily humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) needed to stay in balance, and illness meant one had overtaken the others. Removing the excess would restore equilibrium. George Washington died in 1799 after his physicians removed an estimated 40 percent of his blood, treating what was likely a throat infection. Bloodletting fell out of widespread use in Western medicine gradually across the 19th century, as better scientific methods began to show what should have been obvious: removing large quantities of blood from sick people made them sicker.
Radium in the Medicine Cabinet
By the early 20th century, radium had a marketing problem that wasn’t actually a problem yet. It glowed, and it seemed to make people feel energetic. That combination was enough for manufacturers to put it in everything. Radium-laced water crocks were sold as health tonics. Radium toothpaste appeared on drugstore shelves. Radium face creams were sold to women as brightening treatments.
Factory workers who painted watch dials with radium-based luminous paint in the 1910s and 1920s, known as the “Radium Girls,” were instructed to point their brushes with their lips. They developed bone cancer, jaw necrosis, and aplastic anemia. When they sued their employers in 1927, the case became a landmark in occupational health law. The companies had known the dangers. The products were only slowly pulled from shelves as the evidence became impossible to ignore, and even then, the process took decades.
Public Executions as Community Events
Public executions were seen as moral lessons, reinforcing societal norms by showcasing the consequences of criminal actions. For most of human history, that wasn’t a fringe view. It was the official position of governments across Europe, colonial America, and beyond. Hangings were scheduled in advance, announced publicly, and often drew significant crowds. Vendors set up stalls. Families brought children. In 18th-century London, execution days at Tyburn, where the public gallows stood, were essentially informal public holidays.
The argument in favor was pragmatic: public punishment would deter future crime. The argument against took longer to gain traction, centering on the brutalizing effect on spectators and the spectacle’s tendency to generate sympathy for the condemned rather than disgust. England moved executions behind prison walls in 1868. The last public execution in the United States took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936, and drew an estimated crowd of 20,000 people.
Sati
Sati was a practice in parts of India in which a widow was expected or pressured to die on her husband’s funeral pyre. Although viewed by some as an honorable tradition, it is now recognized as violence against women.
The British colonial administration formally banned sati in Bengal in 1829, under Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, after sustained campaigning by Indian social reformers, most prominently Ram Mohan Roy, a Bengali scholar who argued fiercely that the practice had no genuine religious sanction and was sustained by social coercion rather than any authentic tradition. The ban was contested by conservative Hindu groups who framed it as an attack on religion. Roy’s counter-argument was that the practice wasn’t religion at all. It was, he said, simply violence against widows dressed up in the language of devotion. The practice did not disappear overnight. Isolated incidents were recorded in India as recently as the 1980s and 1990s.
What History Actually Asks of Us
Children aren’t sorting coal at four in the morning. Surgeons aren’t drilling into living skulls to treat sadness. Women can sign their own leases. But the more uncomfortable observation is the speed with which each of these practices was defended, by educated people, using the logic available to them at the time.
The history of the lobotomy is particularly instructive. By the early 1950s, the American Medical Association had serious doubts about the procedure’s effectiveness. And yet it kept going, for another decade and a half, because the institutional momentum had already built and the people making decisions had too much invested in its continuation. That’s not a story about past ignorance. It’s a story about how systems maintain practices long past the point where the evidence has turned against them.
The 10 disturbing rules and customs covered here weren’t historical accidents. They were maintained by law, by social pressure, by economics, and by the human tendency to trust the framework you were born into. The people who lived inside them weren’t uniformly cruel. Most of them just didn’t look too hard at what they were doing, and why, and who was paying the price. The difficult question isn’t whether people back then should have known better. It’s what we’re currently not looking at hard enough right now.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.