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i feel like there's this possessiveness over people's bodies in capitalism that makes it so that it's your duty to be healthy so that you can be a good worker; being sick means damaging your boss's property. addiction is a crime because you are ""choosing"" to damage that property. the same thought goes for disability and being fat (although being fat is not inherently unhealthy but since it's widely viewed as such by society I think it gets included in this mindset)

I just talked with my therapist about this and you’re so so right.

sorry for posting reddit screenshots & i don't have the capacity to transcribe the images right now but this is such a good analysis of this problem lol. "health being a direct result of your actions and something that you earn therefore illness should go away and get better if you do the right things" but also if you aren't getting better they assume that it's because you're doing something wrong and thus clearly deserve to be sick.

[ u/Curious_Person111 asks on r/ChronicIllness: Why do some people just not get the concept of illness getting worse over time? "You could lift this box a month ago!" Yes, but I can't now. How is it so hard to get this through some people's heads?

Professor Of Eyes replies: Because they have internalized the ableist belief that health is a direct result of your actions and is something that you earn, and therefore illness should go away and get better if you do the right things. They are used to illness as something temporary that they can prevent or fix by doing the right healthy things, so when they see someone with an ilnness they cannot control continuing to be sick or getting sicker, at best it confuses them because they assume you should be getting better, or at worst they think you're doing something wrong or not trying hard enough and they need t ostart giving you unsolicited adviced or tell you to try harder :/ ]

Oh my god I have it in my 1946 Lily Wallace New American Cookbook too I’m screaming

This is it! This is the white culture we’ve been looking for!

I’m sorry are we just not gonna mention “Beef Tea” “Raw Beef Tea” and “Cooked Raw Beef Tea” one after the other

#WHY

Because the majority of human existence has not been to the knowledge and supply level we are at now.  You can’t 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. 

Thank you for this addition. People are curiously comfortable assuming everyone in the past was stupid and illogical, and it’s always struck me as showing a sad lack of empathy for fellow human beings. It’s like people in the past aren’t 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 can’t keep anything down. It’s essentially oral rehydration therapy. 

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. 

It also corresponds with the year William Brooke O’Shaughnessy 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. “Toast water” was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients. 

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.