New Englanders in the 19th century were so terrified of tuberculosis that they began digging up their dead relatives and burning their hearts to stop vampires.

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New Englanders in the 19th century were so terrified of tuberculosis that they began digging up their dead relatives and burning their hearts to stop vampires. The widespread consumption epidemic was poorly understood by medical science, causing victims to slowly waste away, cough up blood, and look incredibly pale. Desperate families assumed the first person to die in a household was actually a demon feeding on the life force of the surviving relatives. To stop the curse, they would exhume the rotting corpse, decapitate it, and occasionally drink the ashes of the cremated internal organs mixed with water. This perfectly rational healthcare strategy highlights the golden age of American medicine where cannibalizing your dead uncle was a valid prescription for a lung infection!