- Your job could be worse — much worse.
We’ve all had that one job that absolutely sucked. Yet, because compared to some jobs of the past, whatever you did was child’s play.
We’re not saying that horrible jobs have been eliminated — they still very much exist. However, technological and scientific advances have eliminated many of the most horrendous occupations of the past.
Here’s a sampling of seven jobs we sure are glad we (or you) won’t have to do anymore.
1. Leech Collector
As you may be aware, bloodletting was a fairly popular medical procedure in the days gone by. One way to relieve a person of excess blood was to cover them in leeches.
But have you ever thought about where the old-timey doctors got all those leeches? Well, they probably purchased them from leech collectors.
They, meanwhile, got their leeches the traditional way. They would strip down and walk into a muddy, leech-infested pond.
Once a suitable haul had bitten on, they’d march back ashore, pluck the leeches off, and sell them.
2. Fuller
Wool was (and is) a valuable material for cloth, but raw wool is covered in grease and oil, which makes it hard to work with. So, those oils must be washed off the wool, and that’s a fuller’s job.
The fuller cleaned wool by placing it in a large vat, pouring in the cleaning agent, and then stomping on the wool with their bare feet until it was clean. The job was monotonous and mind-numbingly boring.
Yet, the worst part was the cleaning agent. Getting oil off the wool required an alkaline solution — and the most abundant one was stale human urine.
That’s right — if you were a fuller, you got to walk around in piss all day long, every day.
3. Food Taster
On paper, being a food taster sounds like a pretty sweet deal, pun intended. You get to eat fine foods, live in royal residences, and often enjoy special social privileges.
The downside is why the kings and queens of the past hired food tasters in the first place. They were scared to death of being poisoned, which wasn’t an unfounded fear at all.
Sure, you get to eat the cooking of the finest chefs in the land. But every single bite could very well be your last.
Now, the job of a food taster hasn’t disappeared — Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, for instance, reportedly still employ them. The job is far from common, though, so it made this list.
4. Petardier
What’s a petardier? Well, that’s the guy who carries a petard — a primitive Renaissance-era bomb used to breach castle walls.
And when we say primitive, we mean it. The petardier would have to carry the explosive (which could weigh dozens of pounds) to the sieged castle’s wall, light the fuse, and run away.
Of course, you’d do all this while the defenders are shooting at you. And what should happen if a stray projectile hits the bomb, or you simply bump it a bit wrong?
Why, it would explode in your hands. And that’s where the saying “hoisted by one’s own petard” comes from.
5. Victorian Scavenger
Victorian England, and London in particular, had a sprawling underground scavenging economy. Although it was illegal, scavenging was so common among the city’s poor that it formed into different niches — each more disgusting than the last.
Mudlarks, for instance, spent all night standing knee-deep in the freezing River Thames, looking for anything worth a pittance in the mud. Bone grubbers, meanwhile, looked for pieces of bone in trash piles and butcher shops so they could sell them to artisans or soap makers.
Finally, at the bottom of the scavenging ladder, you had the tosher. These unfortunate individuals made their living by harvesting valuables from the excrement streams running through Victorian London’s sewers.
6. Match Maker
We’re talking about someone who makes matchsticks here; not someone who turns people into couples. Making matchsticks used to be a horrendous job because the combustible material used back in the day was white phosphorus.
The job itself was easy if dull — take a stick, dip one end in the vat of phosphorus, repeat. But phosphorus gives off fumes and breathing those was a nightmare become reality.
Over time, by which we mean a few weeks on the job, the phosphorus would begin to eat away at your jawbone. First, your gums would swell, then you’d develop toothaches, and eventually, your teeth would begin to fall out.
Within a few months, your jaw would get necrotic and your jawbone would start glowing in the dark while you experienced seizures. At this point, the medical knowledge of the time knew of only one cure — total removal of the jawbone.
7. Tanner
For most of human history, leather has been a valuable raw material for everything from clothing to toolmaking. Yet, tanners — the people making the precious leather — have been despised throughout the ages because their job is, frankly, disgusting.
To begin with, they’d have to soak the animal hides in stinking pits of lime (which came from the aforementioned stale urine) to weaken their hairs. Then, they’d manually scrape away all hair, fat, and other (now rotting) fleshy stuff on the hide.
Then, the hide would go in for another soak — in a fermenting mixture of water and feces. The s*** sauce was necessary to soften the leather and make it flexible for use.
Tanneries were some of the foulest-smelling places in history and weren’t typically allowed to be built anywhere near cities. We can only imagine how jealous tanners of the past would be of modern chemicals.