You've probably never heard of the disease called chlorosis, because we don't deal with it anymore. But in the 1890s, it was quite common. Chlorosis gave the sufferer a host of symptoms, but the most baffling -and the one responsible for the name- was a green tint to the skin.
For centuries, chlorosis was a constant — though the diagnoses behind it shifted with the societal and medical norms of the time. First described in 1554, it was known until the mid-1700s as the “disease of virgins,” and the best cure was thought to be intercourse (bloodletting was also a popular treatment).
“Chlorosis was absolutely seen as a women’s disease, which meant, as it still often means today, that it got little attention and was easily dismissed with absurd cures,” says Anna Scanlon, director of the writing center at Illinois Wesleyan University and an avid researcher of chlorosis. Other treatments included telling women to conceive, exercise or abandon education. While there were physicians who believed that men could also contract chlorosis, such cases were thought to be extremely rare, and those men diagnosed with it were usually described as effeminate. The disease was predominately associated with the upper classes until the mid-19th century, when the medical establishment realized that poor women could also lack adequate nutrition and exposure to sunlight.
Luckily, since then medical science has figured out what caused chlorosis and how to treat it. But the reason for the green tint is still somewhat of a mystery. Read about chlorosis at Ozy. -via Digg