Scholars in the 1970s compiling the first comprehensive Sumerian dictionary struggled to interpret a phrase that translated into English as “He put a hot fish in her navel.”

At the 1883 trial of Alferd Packer, who ate five members of his prospecting party in Colorado after the group got lost during a winter trek, the judge was said to have told the convicted, “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you’ve ate five of them, God damn you. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you is dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democrat population of the state.”

Andean legends tell of pishtacos, bogeymen who steal their victims’ fat. In colonial times they were said to be Franciscan monks who used the fat as church-bell grease or holy oil. By the 1960s they were sometimes represented as workers who used it to lubricate modern factory machinery or airplane engines. 

Before Michelangelo’s David was placed in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504, Leonardo argued the nude sculpture needed “a decent ornament” and sketched it with underpants inked on. David was later fitted with a prim brass girdle sustaining twenty-eight copper leaves. It remained for at least forty years. 

A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”

“He whose meat in this world do I eat,” reads the Hindu Laws of Manu, “will in the other world me eat.” Another verse simply warns not to “behave like the flesh-eating ghouls.” 

Athenaeus wrote that fourth-century-BC Greek courtesan Phryne was so beautiful “she used to wear a tunic covering her whole person” because it was “not easy to see her naked.” Once prosecuted for a capital crime, she was about to be declared guilty when the orator pleading her case brought her to the middle of the court and ripped off her tunic. The judges, “so moved by pity,” acquitted her of all charges. 

Lucian claims in his True History to have traveled to the moon. There, he writes, he encountered a tribe of Treemen whose reproductive method was to cut off and plant a man’s right testicle, let it grow into “an enormous tree of flesh, like a phallus,” then harvest and carve men from its large acorns. Wealthy Treemen were given genitals of ivory; the poor got wood.

“There were very few beauties,” wrote Jane Austen to her sister about a party she attended in 1800. The two Miss Maitlands had “a good deal of nose”; the General, “the gout”; Mrs. Maitland, “the jaundice”; and regarding Susan, Sally, and Miss Debary, Austen was “as civil to them as their bad breath would allow.”

Menstrual taboos persisted in nineteenth-century Europe. In the Rhine it was said that women on their periods turned fermenting wine to vinegar, in France that they were unable to whip up a successful batch of mayonnaise, in Britain that “women should not rub the legs of pork with the brine-pickle at the time they are menstruating, or the hams will go bad.”

Though described by Suetonius as having a “fat neck” and “potbelly,” Nero competed at the Olympics in 67, in the chariot race. He fell out of his vehicle and failed to finish but paid hefty bribes to the judges and secured first place.

A French tale from 1615 contains a rare early modern mention of a married woman considering birth control. Her method: pressing a bead of perfume on “that artery that the vulgar calls the pulse” during intercourse. The procedure fails—not due to its own inadequacies, the reader is told, but because the woman, so taken by her activity, neglects to apply the perfume.

The oldest known tattoos belong to Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummified corpse who suffered from heart and Lyme disease, colonic whipworms, gallbladder stones, missing ribs, and arthritic joints. His sixty-one tattoos are patches of small charcoal incisions; their proximity to acupuncture points has led researchers to believe they were created for curative purposes. 

Seneca the Younger tells of Hostius Quadra, who installed mirrors in his bedroom to reflect distorted images. “He relished the exaggerated endowment of his own organ as much as if it were real,” Seneca complained. Quadra confirmed: “If I could,” he said, “I’d have that size in the flesh; since I can’t, I’ll feast on the fantasy.”

A fourteenth-century Egyptian encyclopedia includes a recipe to “tighten the vagina.” One should grind “the scorched skin of a jackal, the scorched hooves of a goat, the scorched hoof of a donkey, scorched thorn apple, a scorched sea crab, scorched polypody, and Persian thyme,” then administer as a suppository. “The woman,” promises the compiler, “becomes like a virgin.”