History is full of jobs that are no longer needed due to technology, cultural advances, and everything in between. From sin-eater to hokey-pokey man and beyond, let's explore the strangest occupations of yesteryear.
In the early 1900s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture enlisted a group of men to voluntarily ingest meals laced with a variety of contaminants, from formaldehyde to sulfuric acid to borax, a mineral now commonly used as an ant killer.
This lousy job was necessary because at the time, food manufacturers were free to put anything into their edible items. The government needed to establish a baseline for safe levels of these additives, and the so-called poison squad was formed.
The poison squad team worked from 1902 to 1907 under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry and its chief poisoner, Harvey Washington Wiley. Wiley fed his men three nutritious-yet-dangerous meals per day and recorded their symptoms as he increased the levels of preservatives and other artificial ingredients. In exchange for the food, the men reported their symptoms, including headaches, stomachaches, and general malaise.
Despite the dubiousness of the work, it did lead to the government cracking down on rogue food producers and banning harmful ingredients. Since the offending substances were no longer allowed, there was no more need for these human barometers. And hardly anyone died as a result of that pioneering work. (The family of one participant claimed his tuberculosis was the result of consuming too much borax.)
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Those living in Victorian-era London celebrated the finer things in life. And what could be more elegant than a leather satchel or finely-crafted leather shoes all prepared with a rich helping of dog poop? To treat leather, tanners used dog excrement, which softened the hide and made it more flexible. But the tanners didn't collect the feces. That job was delegated to pure finders. The poop was known as pure probably because it purified the leather, and finder was just a euphemism for "retriever." (The process was also known as puering if dog poop was used, or bating if the tanners used hen or pigeon poop.)
How does one get such a coveted position? Many people were already scouring the streets for anything to resell, so moving over to dog poop wasn't such a big deal. The pure finders, or entre-poo-neurs, tended to congregate where stray dogs were known to be found, presumably since they wouldn't have considerate owners cleaning up after them. If a pure finder got really lucky, they could get friendly with a kennel owner and exploit those lumpy riches.
The job wasn't really all that despised. In 2015, Vet Times, a popular veterinary publication, quoted this old-timey rhyme:
"I am an old pure-finder, when folks say 'How d'ya do?'
Says I, 'Well, I do doodoo and do do well don't you?'
I do doodoo so well, when the doodoo I do sell,
But could do doodoo better if the doodoo didn't smell."
A kind of brown gold rush developed, with pure finders competing against each other for the valued resource, but pure finders eventually went the way of the dodo as modern science allowed us to apply relevant enzymes to the leather without needing the involvement of a dog's digestive tract.
Have you ever gone for a haircut and wished you could have had your stylist take a look at that weird mole on your back? Or go to the doctor and have them trim your bangs? Once upon a time in the Middle Ages, you could. This one-stop grooming and health check-up was the purview of the barber surgeon, a barber who could practice medicine.
The job came as a result of priests of the 13th century being prohibited from performing surgery, a task that had once fallen in their hands. Instead, the reasoning went, barbers could probably handle all the gruesome surgical treatments since they knew how to handle a razor. When the Black Death rolled around and wiped out actual doctors, barber-surgeons were once again in high demand.
Barber-surgeons fell out of favor once people realized it was better to leave surgery to trained medical professionals. France, for example, banned barbers from cutting people open in 1743. But there is a theory that there is one lingering reminder of this grisly occupation. The red, blue and white barbershop poles seen outside barbershops might have once represented the blood and bandages that such businesses once relied upon. The blue was for the veins they'd attack in the course of bloodletting.
These days you can call pretty much anyone you like and talk for any length of time for a monthly service charge. But not long ago, if you were out and about and needed to give someone a buzz, you needed to find a pay phone. Pay telephones were once a common sight across the country, with an estimated 2.6 million in use at their peak in 1995. Each one accepted coins -- typically quarters -- in order for people to make a call. Collecting those quarters was up to the telephone companies, who dispatched coin collectors to go from site to site collecting the change from the boxes.
While the job wasn't typically hazardous, it could occasionally get exciting. In 1962, a man named Robert Smith was gathering change in San Francisco when a thief forced him into a car at gunpoint and ran off with $1000 in collected currency.
Payphone collectors actually did OK toward the end, with one newspaper quoting a salary of up to $40,000 in 2003, which would be roughly $71,000 today. But not long after that came the rise of the smartphone and the obsolescence of not only collectors but pay phones themselves. Today there are fewer than 100,000 in use, many owned and maintained by small local businesses. Some, like a few found in Colorado, don't have working coin slots and are good only for local or prepaid calls.
The next time your child complains about having to mow the lawn, you can give them the old back-in-my-day speech. Or, maybe back in your great-great-great-grandparent's day. That's about the time people signed up to be leech collectors. These brave but unfortunate souls gathered leeches for medicinal purposes by wading into leech-infested waters and allowing the parasites to latch onto their skin. Depending on how well the work was going, these people might experience fatigue from blood loss.
Leeches were used when physicians believed bloodletting would prove useful for ailments. That was based on the theory most illnesses were the result of inflammation that could be cured by having your blood sucked out. And while bloodletting isn't really a thing anymore, leeches have made a comeback. In 2004, the FDA approved the use of leeches for facilitating blood flow following reconstructive surgery. Today's leeches are harvested in special labs and snack on blood-filled sausages until they're ready to clamp on someone's reattached ear.
In the 1500s to 1700s, kings including Henry VIII tasked underlings with being their groom of the stool, or bathroom attendant. These men were charged with chatting with their king as they went about their business. But the job title didn't refer to that stool -- close stool was the name for the portable velvet-cushioned toilet they rested their royal buttocks on. Luckily for the grooms, there's no direct evidence they were responsible for wiping.
At the time, it wasn't so unusual to be accompanied during one's most private moments, and grooms could even learn some hot royal gossip in the process. Female monarchs tended not to have a groom of the stool -- or stole, as it increasingly came to be called -- so Victoria didn't have one. Her son, the future king Edward VII, did have one when he was the Prince of Wales, but the job didn't make the transition when he became king and the grooms of the stool were relieved of their duties.
Prior to the advent of long-haul trucking or wider railroad distribution, river pigs were responsible for steering giant pieces of lumber down rivers to sawmills. But they weren't riding a single log down a river. River pigs are often associated with what are called drives.
Loggers would keep piling logs into a lake or other body of water waiting for the spring runoff. One book on the subject called River Pigs & Cayuses says that logs kept piling up "all summer until the logjam would be about thirty feet high at the lower end and five miles long. That's what the river pigs had to break up when they started driving in the spring." As you can imagine, it's incredibly difficult to command that amount of logs, and it was all too easy for a river pig to slip off and drown. A mishap could also create a chain reaction. If one log got jammed, that would create a pile-up.
The river pigs used a giant stick to try and control the logs and wore spikes to maintain traction while straddling them. In North Idaho, the pigs were working as late as the 1970s. By then, the logs had caused river diversions and other environmental damage, while new technology has made the river route unnecessary.
In the 1930s and 1940s, people could acquire cigarettes from cigarette girls -- hostesses whose sole job was to peddle tobacco at nightclubs, bars, and other establishments. Usually, the sellers wore a tray secured with a neck strap and a jaunty bellman's hat. The job was eventually outsourced to technology -- in this case, cigarette vending machines, which grew in popularity in the 1950s. Though some clubs have employed cigarette girls as a kind of retro throwback, the job has largely gone the way of smoking itself.
In the early days of the United States Navy, sailors dubbed loblolly boys were tasked with cleaning surgical instruments and restraining patients during procedures in the years before anesthesia. If patients had to have limbs amputated, they were responsible for disposing of them. Loblolly was the term for a thick porridge they were also responsible for serving on ships. The job later evolved into the role of hospital corpsman, also medical assistants, but thankfully not tasked with serving meals between procedures.
Throughout history, the living have been very preoccupied with the dead. We want to make sure loved ones are at peace. During the 18th and 19th centuries, one way of ensuring that was to enlist the services of a sin-eater, a person who would attend a funeral and consume food and drink that were meant to embody the decedent's sins. In doing so, the dead person could continue into the afterlife without worrying about being punished for their transgressions.
Early on, sin-eaters were not exactly treated with reverence. They'd eat bread that had been placed on the corpse and then get ushered out of the house. Because sin-eaters were thought to absorb someone's evil deeds, they were often social pariahs. They were, after all, burdened with the sins of entire villages. Some say that over time, this custom evolved into families eating and drinking in celebration of someone's life.
Once upon a time, before electricity, walking home in the dark was a pretty frightening prospect. That's why Londoners of the 18th century relied upon link boys: These tiny tykes carried torches and were summoned by people to walk in tandem with them and illuminate their path home.
This practice was so widespread that homes often had a link extinguisher attached to their exterior walls. That way, the link boy could save his fuel until he got another fare. But every once in a while, a link boy could turn out to be a link thief who would snuff out his light and run off with his customer's valuables. By the time gas-fueled street lamps were appearing in the early 1800s, link boys were being put out of business. Child labor would persist for decades to come.
Everyone loves the ice cream man, but few remember the hokey-pokey man. That's because this iteration of a jovial dispenser of treats was actually fairly sinister. The hokey-pokey man navigated impoverished neighborhoods in the 1800s, offering cheap desserts like flavored ice and low-quality ice cream. His name was said to come from the hocus-pocus or hokum that was thought to hype his crummy offerings.
Whether or not the criticisms of the hokey-pokey man were actual concerns or 19th-century moralizing about poor children having ice cream -- and the largely immigrant men who were selling it to them -- is a legitimate debate. But a lot of this ice cream was made in not exactly sanitary conditions, and people were getting sick, and not just from hokey-pokey. In the early 20th century, increased food safety standards made the job obsolete.
Who doesn't love a garden gnome to provide some lawn decoration? If you were an 18th century British rich guy, you might have considered hiring an actual hermit. Ornamental hermits or garden hermits were employees of an estate who lived in quaint little shelters known as hermitages and puttered around for the amusement of property owners and their visitors.
To be clear, hermits were not enslaved. It was at-will employment, but it was still somewhat dehumanizing. One 18th-century ad for a hermit at Painshill noted that while the hermit would get food from the house delivered by a servant, they couldn't speak one syllable to said servant. The hermit had to wear a wool robe, walk around barefoot, not cut his beard or nails, or go into the open area of the property. For seven years. If he made it, he'd be paid a substantial lump sum -- but if he violated just one requirement, he'd get nothing.
Hermits fell out of favor when landowners realized it was ridiculous to keep a pseudo-hobbit on the payroll; the concept of subsidizing a hermit just to keep old traditions alive was too antiquated to continue.