12 Harrowing Vintage Photos of Soldiers in Complete Shell Shock

“They were very pathetic, these shell shocked boys.”

Shell shock is a phrase coined in World War I to describe the type of posttraumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war. It is reaction to the intensity of the bombardment and fighting that produced a helplessness appearing variously as panic and being scared, or flight, an inability to reason, sleep, walk or talk.

During the War, the concept of shell shock was ill-defined. Cases of 'shell shock' could be interpreted as either a physical or psychological injury, or simply as a lack of moral fibre. The term shell shock is still used by the Veterans Administration to describe certain parts of PTSD but mostly it has entered into popular imagination and memory, and is often identified as the signature injury of the War.

In World War II and thereafter, diagnosis of 'shell shock' was replaced by that of combat stress reaction, a similar but not identical response to the trauma of warfare and bombardment.

These photos of soldiers with shell shock are some of the most disturbing pictures of war, for they show a side of war not often discussed – the mental toll it takes on soldiers after it is all said and done.

1. The Eyes Of Madness.

France, September 15, 1916

2. Patient Suffering From 'War Neuroses' As Shell Shock Was Referred To

World War I

3. The Thousand-Yard Stare Of A Young Marine

Marshall Islands, February 1944

4. US Patrol Team Leader In Vietnam

Vietnam, 1968

5. Soviet Soldier Stares Blankly Into The Distance

World War II

See more»

11 Classic Hollywood Stars Who Had Plastic Surgery

When you look at the famous stars of the classic Hollywood era, do you think they’ve always looked like that? Do you think their beauty is always natural? We often assume that old Hollywood stars are just naturally beautiful, and never had anything done, just because it was a long time ago, and because they look different to what modern celebrities look like now.

Plastic surgery has actually been a staple for Hollywood stars since 1920s. A lot of the stars we consider to be the beauty icons of classic Hollywood have actually had plastic surgery and today we’re going to take a look at some of them and what they’ve had done.

1. Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was the first actress who admitted to having plastic surgery. It was reported that the actress got her first plastic surgery in 1960s. Some of plastic surgery procedures she had were facelift, nose job, lip enhancement and Botox injection.


2. Marilyn Monroe

There’s been a lot of discussion regarding Marilyn’s beauty over the years, and how much of it was natural and whether or not she’s had plastic surgery. She never mentioned it, which was probably the smart thing to do at the time. However around 50 years after her death it was revealed to the public that she had, in fact, had plastic surgery done. She has undergone a rhinoplasty, which was very dangerous at the time, and the shape of her chin was changed too. While Marilyn was already gorgeous to begin with, she did have a little help from a plastic surgeon.


3. Marlene Dietrich

People say you could cut yourself on Marlene Dietrich’s cheekbones, but were those sharp features god given to her? Well, it’s hard to tell, we know for sure that lighting and makeup had something to do with that. But what’s more horrifying is that apparently Dietrich has had several molars surgically removed in order to achieve those sharp cheeks. How does that even work? Don’t ask us, that was a weird time for Hollywood.


4. Dean Martin

As it turns out, the King of Cool apparently wasn’t that cool with some of his features. In fact, Dean Martin, the famous actor, singer, comedian went under the knife when his career started taking off. He got rhinoplasty in order to make his nose look narrower. As you can see the plastic surgery was a great success. The shape of his nose stayed pretty much the same, but it wasn’t as wide anymore.


5. Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth was known as the sex symbol of Hollywood in 1940s, but do you know how much she had to go through for that title? Rita didn’t always look like the redheaded icon we remember. Her hair used to be dark, her forehead – narrow and her skin – a bit darker, after all, Rita was of Spanish descent. In order to look like the Hollywood stars of that time she’s had to undergo electrolysis hair removal to push her hairline back and therefore make her forehead bigger. She then colored her hair red and even whitened her skin. That’s the price you had to pay back in the day to get into Hollywood.

See more»

Miss Correct Posture: Pictures From a Chiropractor's Beauty Contest Took Place in Chicago in 1956

Beauty contests were a way for people, places and businesses to celebrate events, highlight pop culture and promote various products or ideas.

In the 1950s and 1960s, chiropractors around the United States found themselves with a PR problem. So they decided to utilize beauty contests as a way to legitimize their profession. Through these pageants they hoped to gain credibility with traditional doctors. Additionally, the contest winners would win money or scholarships thus increasing the profession's popularity with the general public. “Miss Correct Posture” was one of the few titles used in these chiropractic pageants.

When the nation's chiropractors descended on Chicago for a weeklong convention in May 1956, they threw a beauty contest. The judges crowned Lois Conway, 18, Miss Correct Posture. Second place went to Marianne Caba, 16, according to an account in the Chicago Tribune. Ruth Swenson, 26, came in third.

“All three were picked not only by their apparent beauty, and their X-rays, but also by their standing posture,” the Tribune reported. “Each girl stood on a pair of scales — one foot to each — and the winning trio each registered exactly half her weight on each scale, confirming the correct standing posture.”

See more»

Old Hollywood Plastic Surgery Secrets: Here Are 4 Weird Ways Classic Starlets Changed Their Faces

In Hollywood, plastic surgery is as commonplace as The Paleo Diet. There are a million different ways to tweak, chisel, or reconfigure one's visage as desired thanks to a laundry list of procedures.

The possibilities are so limitless these days, it's got us reminiscing about the golden age of celebrity. Even though they didn't live under the high-definition magnifying glass of today, Old Hollywood starlets were no less vain and thus had to get way more creative in the nip-and-tuck department.

From the up-and-coming ingénue looking to kick-start her career to the lauded actress hoping to freeze her face in time, here are a couple of ways classic Hollywood glamazons altered their famous faces.

1. The Hairline Electrolysis

Back in the heyday of Old Hollywood, hairlines had a lot of sway. In fact, Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, was of Spanish descent and decided to dye her hair red and get rid of her characteristically-Latina lower hairline.

To reshape it, Hayworth underwent a year's worth of electrolysis, which consisted of using a thin metal probe to "shock" the follicle and permanently remove the hair. In the end, her hairline was an inch higher and her new look, for better or for worse, helped launch her career.

Marilyn Monroe was also notorious for undergoing electrolysis, removing her widow's peak to change her face shape.

2. The Sans-Molars Cheekbone Trick

Marlene Dietrich was famous for her cheekbones that could cut glass, but rumor has it they weren't part of her born-with-it bone structure. According to folklore, the German-American beauty had her molars removed to emphasize the hollows of her cheeks. And you thought fillers sounded unpleasant...


3. The Croydon Facelift

In case you had your doubts, Dietrich had a very high threshold pain. In addition to her dentistry tactics, she was also a fan of the Croydon Facelift method, using both surgical tape and strategically-twisted piece of hair to pull the skin up around her face.


4. The Did-She-or-Didn't-She Nose Job

Unlike today, where every star and their mother has had a nose job (we're partially kidding), it was a less popular, and more risky procedure amongst the Old Hollywood crowd. This said, rhinoplasty did happen. And it's hard to say who definitely had work done, but X-rays of Monroe's skull (weird, we know) indicated she had some type of procedure to alter the cartilage around the tip of her nose.

(This original article was published on Marie Claire)

Bad Invention: Psychograph, a Phrenology Machine to Measure the Shape of Your Head From the Early 20th Century

In 1901, Henry C. Lavery, a self-described "profound thinker" of Superior, Wisconsin became certain that phrenology was true and spent his next 26 years endeavoring to put this science into a machine. On January 29, 1931, he and his partner, Frank P. White, a businessman who had taken his life savings of $39,000 out of stock in a local sandpaper manufacturer - the 3M company - to finance the venture, announced the invention of such a machine - the "Psycograph."

The Psycograph was patented in 1905 by Henry Lavery of Superior WI. His first machine with 1,900 parts didn't work!

The machine consisted of 1,954 parts in a metal carrier with a continuous motor-driven belt inside a walnut cabinet containing statements about 32 mental faculties. These faculties were each rated 1 through 5, "deficient" to "very superior," so that there were 160 possible statements but an almost unlimited number of possible combinations. The "score" was determined by the way the 32 probes, each with five contact points in the headpiece, made contact with the head. The subject sat in a chair connected to the machine and the headpiece was lowered and adjusted. The operator then pulled back a lever that activated the belt-driven motor, which then received low-voltage signals from the headpiece and stamped out the appropriate statement for each faculty consecutively.

Original patent for the Psycograph by Henry Lavery.

Thirty three machines were built, and a local office in Minneapolis flourished. The machines were leased to entrepreneurs throughout the country for $2,000 down plus $35 a month. They were popular attractions for theater, lobbies and department stores, which found them good traffic builders during the depression. Two enterprising promoters set up shop in the Black Forest Village at the 1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and netted $200,000 at their standing-room-only booth!

Phrenology in Europe had been abandoned as nonsense long before this time. The brief success of the Psycograph lasted until the mid-thirties when the company closed because of increasing skepticism and declining income. The machines were returned and packed away in storage until the mid-sixties, when John White, the founder's son, and I put several back into working order.

Woman seated with a psychograph, a phrenology machine, on her head, 1931.

(via Museum of Quackery)

20 Haunting Photos From the Heyday of the Eugenics Movement at the Turn of the 20th Century

The photos – from a time Britain and America would prefer to forget – show people’s heads being measured in order to determine their mental faculties as well as displaying the “undesirable” traits of people who “shouldn’t be allowed to breed”.

Before the atrocities of Nazi Germany, eugenics – the system of measuring human traits, seeking out the desirable ones and cutting out the undesirable ones – was once practiced the world over.

In the decades following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, a veritable craze for eugenics spread through Britain, the United States and Europe.

Advocates of the disturbing practice made significant advances during the early twentieth century – and claimed that “undesirable” genetic traits such as dwarfism, deafness and even minor defects like a cleft palate needed to be wiped out of the gene pool.

Portraits demonstrating the standard head shapes of "criminal types" of various races. France, 1914.

A photograph of a Fich Henri Leon, a convicted criminal, with the measurements of his various body parts. Paris, France, 1902.

Photographs of "human races," organized to suggest a common trait shared by "primitive" Australians, Africans, and Neanderthals. Norway, 1939.

French weightlifter Alexandre Maspoli poses as an ideal human specimen on the cover of La Culture Physique. France, 1904.

A demonstration of how to measure a criminal's ear, inspired by Alphonse Bertillon, Paris, France, 1894.

See more»

20 Weird And Terrifying Medical Instruments From the Past That Make You Shudder

In the history of medicine, machines became crucial parts of the diagnostic and treatment process in the first half of the 20th century. Scientists and doctors experimented with some really strange devices, and they developed a lot of creepy-looking health equipment—at least some of which seems almost horrific, seen through the eyes of today. Look at the stuff people jammed in other people!

1. Measuring the brainwaves, 1940.

(Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images)

2. 1955: A portable respirator, or iron lung, designed to enable patients to recuperate at home.

(Image: Hans Meyer/BIPs/Getty Images)

3. 1960: Dr G. H. Byford stands under an optokinetic drum wearing a contact lens with a miniature lamp cemented to the lens, during an experiment to investigate the reflex movements of the eyes and their association with visual illusions, at the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough.

(Image: Harry Thompson/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

4. 1960: A wire suit designed to measure body temperatures while researching the physiological effects of high speed and space travel.

(Image: Ron Case/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

5. 1955: A rotating cobalt machine swinging around the body of a patient, attacking cancerous tumors.

(Image: Carsten/Three Lions/Getty Images)

See more»

Eerie Vintage Portrait Photos of Psychiatric Patients From a French Asylum in the 1880s

These photographs, taken at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris by a team led by Albert Lone, provide a unique insight into treatment of people with mental illnesses in the 1880s.

Each portrait has a small pin hole in the top left corner, suggesting they were attached to a wall or had a loop of wire holding them together. They would have been used to help student doctors identify patients or illnesses, including dementia, mania, lunacy and melancholia.

Photographs of patients in asylums, where patients had varied conditions including epilepsy and STDs, were common in the 1880s. And portraits of mental health patients were also common in Britain - where the tradition began in the 1850s.

This woman's picture was marked 'idiotie'.

This man's pic was labelled 'dementia'.

This woman was being treated for 'mania'.

This French lady was also a patient for 'mania'.

And this man was in the asylum to be treated for 'dementia'.

See more»

That Self-Appendectomy: The Story of Dr. Leonid Rogozov Who Cut Out His Appendix and Shared the Chilling Tale in 1961

So here are the facts: it happened during 6th Soviet Antarctic Expedition at Novolazarevskaya Station. The patient was the only physician on station, so the assistant was a mechanic. It was on April 30, 1961. The operation took 2 hours. He positioned himself so that he could see his own body using a mirror when doing the surgery - he made a 12 cm cut through which he found the appendix. After 5 days the doctor felt good, and after 7 days he removed the wires which had been used to sew up the body. His name: Leonid Rogozov. He published a short note about this in the Soviet Antarctic Expedition Information Bulletin, no. 37, pp. 42-44, 1962.

Antarctica, 1961: Dr. Leonid Rogozov has to remove his own appendix.

Russian surgeon, Leonid Rogozov, did something that had never been done in history when he performed an operation on himself during an expedition to the Antarctic.

He and a team of 12 had just finished building a new base when Leonid fell gravely ill. He diagnosed himself with acute appendicitis but being the only surgeon on the team, he had no help.

Leonid said when describing the ordeal in his diary, “I did not sleep at all last night. It hurts like the devil! A snow storm whipping through my soul, wailing like 100 jackals.”

After weighing all options and realising that there was no help, he knew he had to do something because his appendix was about to burst. He decided to perform an auto-appendectomy rather than die not doing anything.

Rogozov had intended to use a mirror to help him operate but he found its inverted view too much of a hindrance so he ended up working by touch, without gloves.

“Still no obvious symptoms that perforation is imminent," he wrote, "but an oppressive feeling of foreboding hangs over me… This is it… I have to think through the only possible way out – to operate on myself… It’s almost impossible… but I can’t just fold my arms and give up.”

After working out a plan, he gave his colleagues specific tasks. He had two main assistants to hand him instruments and hold a mirror. He hoped to use his reflection to see what he was doing.

He also thought others how to inject him with adrenaline and perform artificial ventilation if he loses consciousness.

“My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them. They stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.”

He applied local anaesthetic to his abdominal wall but after cutting through, the rest had to be done without pain relief so he could keep his head as clear as possible. He could not work well with the mirror because the view from that angle was confusing. He did the rest through touch and without gloves. When he reached the final part, he got weaker and was afraid he would fail.

Leonid Rogozov lying down talking to his friend Yuri Vereschagin at Novolazarevskaya.

“I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every four to five minutes I rest for 20 – 25 seconds.”

“Finally here it is – the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst… My heart seized up and noticeably slowed, my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly and all that was left was removing the appendix.”

Fortunately, he succeeded. The whole operation took nearly two hours. Afterwards, he instructed his team on how to clean the surgical instrument then took some antibiotics and sleeping tablets.

Two weeks later, Leonid was healed and ready to return to work.

Leonid Rogozov in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) a few years after his return to Russia.

Leonid Rogozov’s son, Vladislav Rogozov believes that his father’s legacy is one of inspiration. He says, “If you find yourself in a seemingly desperate situation when all the odds are against you. Even if you are in the middle of the most hostile environment, do not give up. Believe in yourself and fight, fight for life.”

Leonid was awarded for his bravery but shunned publicity and simply faced his job as a surgeon. Quite an impressive feat.

Haunting Photos Show the Bleak Conditions Faced by Desperate Patients at an American Mental Hospital in the 1940s

The harrowing photographs show the rundown asylum where patients were badly treated and often left for days on end without any attention. These images show how patients were badly treated and left abandoned inside the Cleveland State Hospital, Ohio in 1946.

The pictures were taken by photographers Jerry Cooke and Mary Delaney Cooke, who were sent to capture the conditions inside the facility for part of an article that appeared in LIFE magazine. The article was used as an exposé to shed light on the shocking conditions inside the institution and to campaign for better facilities.

Forgotten patients were left to sit around in corridors at the US hospital.

A female patient suffering from withdrawal buries her head in her hands.

A barefoot patient breaks away from the group in one of the communal rooms.

Two men stare out of the windows in a stark hospital ward.

A patient takes part in a finger painting activity.

See more»