In the early 1900s, American mail-order catalogs sold weight-loss pills that were exactly what they sounded like: live tapeworm eggs, swallowed on purpose. The parasite would grow inside the buyer’s gut for months, quietly eating a share of every meal, until it was removed — sometimes by a doctor, sometimes not at all. This is the strange, genuinely dangerous history of the tapeworm diet, from the traveling patent-medicine salesmen who peddled it to the deworming crazes that still occasionally resurface as an urban legend today.
Shop the styles/items featured in this video:
- Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (book)
- Vintage patent medicine advertising art print
- Parasites: The Battle for Survival (book)
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