Because the majority of human existence has not been to the knowledge and supply level we are at now. You canât just give someone electrolytes in the 19th century, you have no idea what the fuck they are. Someone is sick, and can only keep weak liquids down, but you know enough at this point to realise that man cannot live on water alone.  So you work out really weird ways to infuse foodstuffs into liquids they can handle to try and keep food into them.
A lot of these also come from a way to stretch nutrient sources in times of poverty and scarcity.Â
Thank you for this addition. People are curiously comfortable assuming everyone in the past was stupid and illogical, and itâs always struck me as showing a sad lack of empathy for fellow human beings. Itâs like people in the past arenât seen as, you know, people
Your local 19th century PhD researcher popping in here to add to this. Toast water is 100% a drink for treating illness. It turns up listed in several household medicine guides in the 19th century, and is listed as for treating people with fever, diarrhoea and vomiting, who canât keep anything down. Itâs essentially oral rehydration therapy.Â
It interestingly starts turning up in literature in the period covering five major cholera outbreaks in the UK and US (this was obviously an English language Ngram search).
And peaks several times at epidemic peak points (1830s, 1850, 1880s), including its first peak in 1831/2, which corresponds with the first cholera epidemic in the UK.Â
It also corresponds with the year William Brooke OâShaughnessy discovered that a lot of people who were dying of cholera were severely lacking water and salts in their blood and urine. Dehydration was found to be a major cause of death in cholera patients. âToast waterâ was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients.Â
Most of the recipes in household medicine guides I found suggest sweetening or flavouring the toast water with something if the patient could keep it down in order to cover the terrible taste.
People in the past were just people. And in this particular case, they were trying to keep their loved ones from dying of cholera.Â
you didnât even reply to my message you just posted a screenshot of the message.
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whatever if i was on twitter it would get a Fox pilot and a blue checmark for that
one of my favorite beetles, the camphor shoot borer (Cnestus mutilatus), loves ethanol so much that theyâre known to burrow into plastic gas cans and drown just for a sip of that tender sauce
It is true, but @bowelfly knows more about beetles than I do, so I wouldnât question them anyway!
okay huh i DEFINITELY made a post about them in the past but canât find it so i can only assume it got murdered during the big stupid 2018 purge. booooooo fuck u tumblr
anyway so camphor shoot borers are, first and foremost, extremely cute:
beyond that, theyâre ambrosia beetles that feed on a special fungus that they cultivate in the xylem of weakened and dying trees. ethanol is an abundant byproduct of necrosis in trees, so the beetle is highly attuned to seeking it out.
gas also contains ethanol, so sometimes this happens:
