Gasp at some of the crazy inventions and innovations of yesteryear that the public lapped up, and marvel at the fact that the human race has somehow managed to survive.

We now live in an age where health and safety laws are often seen as having become so all-pervading that they are totally oppressive. But wind back the years and you will soon find out what life was like when nobody gave two hoots for such niceties as product safety and non-toxic ingredients. Take a trip down memory lane and see some of the ludicrously dangerous things our close ancestors considered perfectly okay.

1. Keep the kids radioactive

Yes, this was a real thing, an atomic energy kit for children that included small amounts of uranium ore. The A.C. Gilbert Company’s U-238 Atomic Energy Lab was launched to an unsuspecting public in 1950, priced at $49.50. This was a princely sum for a child’s toy back then, but can you put a price on fun like this? One suggested game was to use the Geiger counter supplied to hunt for previously hidden radioactive material, samples of which were also generously included in the kit – astonishingly.

2. Things went better with coke

To be fair, these tasty cocaine toothache drops were meant for sufferers of all ages. But, as can plainly be seen in this subtle 1885 advertisement, the makers definitely included children as potential users. No doubt the cocaine did wonders for toothache, but may also have turned the patient into a raddled drug fiend if they took enough. Which would be easy enough to do since these more-ish cocaine drops cost a mere 15 cents.

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3. Mercury as a medicine

The sexually transmitted disease syphilis is a horrific condition that left untreated can lead to gross disfigurement, madness and ultimately death. Mercury was used as early as the 16th century as a treatment for the condition and the liquid metal’s use continued well into the 20th century. Thankfully, in the 1940s it was discovered that penicillin is a much more effective treatment for the disease, and mercury was dropped.

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4. Pop your progeny in the post

A long journey with small offspring can try the patience of the most tolerant parent. And sitting in one spot for hours can turn the most angelic child into a pint-sized demon. But there was once a solution – stick your kid in the mail! And it really did happen in the early days of the U.S. Postal Service’s Parcel Post at the beginning of the 20th century. The practice was encouraged by the fact that postal rates were less expensive than train tickets.

5. Messing with molten metal

It is great to see kids learning a new skill. But any responsible parent would surely draw the line at this hot-ticket item from the 1920s. This play set involved a child heating lead pellets to melting point and then pouring the molten results into molds. The melting point of lead is recorded at 621°F. However, it is not recorded how many children ended up in the emergency room following a session with the Kaster Kit Jr.

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6. Put your baby behind bars

Ingenious but insouciant parents who lacked yard space offered another example of questionable childcare practices from the past. If you lived in an apartment with no way for your kid to out into the fresh air, then why not suspend them in a cage hanging out of the window? This bewildered looking infant is hanging off the side of a building in the East End of London in 1934.

7. Revive yourself with a radioactive refreshment

It seems remarkable now, but in the early 20th century a belief in the health benefits of radioactive substances was apparently widespread. One popular beverage of the day was Radithor Certified Radioactive Water. But the Wall Street Journal called time on these drinks in 1932 with the graphic headline, “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.”

8. A little horse for when you’re feeling a little hoarse

We have Bayer Laboratories to thank for this particular cough medicine. Since the remedy included a generous helping of heroin, if it didn’t actually cure your cough, you would probably be past caring anyway. Our predecessors evidently had a much more relaxed attitude towards powerful narcotics than we do today. In fact, heroin was legal in the U.S. until 1924.

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9. Eating for two with a tapeworm

The idea of deliberately ingesting a tapeworm as part of a dieting plan will make most people feel nauseous, to say the least. But apparently some weight-conscious folk used to do exactly that. They believed that, once it lodged itself in their gut, the tapeworm would eat some of the food they consumed. The upside was that the dieter’s total calorie intake was reduced. The downside unfortunately included constipation, malnutrition and headaches. Oh, and these decidedly uncuddly critters can also migrate to the brain, causing death.

10. Using arsenic to alleviate skin problems

At least this 19th-century advertisement from the Middleton Drug Company is upfront about the fact that the product it was promoting contained a deadly ingredient. But the claim that the poison was “perfectly harmless” and rendered “genuinely safe” due to its “French preparation” is a bit hard to swallow. One of the more regrettable potential side effects of arsenic is, of course, death. But at least the corpse would not suffer from muddy skin and moth wrinkles.

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11. Not so easily lead

We now regard many of the beautiful automobiles from the 1950s as design classics. That they may well be, but the gas-guzzlers were also deadly because of the toxic lead routinely added to fuel at that time. It took until 1996 for lead to be banned from gas in the U.S. and it is now illegal in the vast majority of countries. If you are desperate for a hit of lead, you will now need to travel to Iraq, Algeria or Yemen – the only territories reported to be still adding the heavy metal to their fuel.

12. Sending children up the chimneys

If you were a chimney sweep in the 18th or 19th centuries, and you came across a flue that was too narrow for you to climb, there was one simple answer. Send a young child up there! In England, kids from the poorest of the poor, aged as young as six, became indentured apprentices to chimney sweeps. This meant that the children had to stick to the job until they were 18. Not that all of the poor kids suffered that long – an all-too-common occupational hazard was death.

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13. Suspend your disbelief

In his day, back in the 19th century, Lewis Albert Sayre was considered one of the most eminent orthopedic surgeons in the U.S. Examine some of his methods and you might well thank your lucky stars for the advances made in modern medicine since. Despite appearances, this lady was not in fact involved in some exotic bondage session. Actually, this procedure – under the supervision of the good doctor himself – was supposedly helping to straighten her spine.

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14. Facing up to cosmetic changes

What better way to make your skin positively glow with vitality than to apply radioactive face cream? At least that is what people seemed to believe in the early 20th century. After Marie and Pierre Curie had discovered radium, it became all the rage to incorporate the chemical element into all sorts of beauty treatments. These, as we can see from this 1933 French ad, included face cream. Fortunately, cosmetic companies have a rather more cautious attitude towards carcinogenic substances nowadays.

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15. Eye opening beauty treatments

In the 19th century, women thought it was a good idea to use an extract from the belladonna plant as eyedrops. Bella donna means beautiful woman in Italian, so using it as a beauty aid makes some kind of sense. Unfortunately, the plant goes by another name – deadly nightshade – so letting it anywhere near your eyes makes no sense at all. In fact, belladonna is one of the most highly poisonous plants in the world. But the toxic eyedrops made the pupils dilate, which was considered a sign of beauty way back when, so some women were prepared to take the risk.

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16. Mocking the afflicted for mad laughs

It seems utterly repugnant to modern sensibilities, but at one time a visit to the Bedlam asylum for the insane in London was considered an amusing day out. Properly called the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the institution appeared to have little respect for its inmates from the 16th to the 18th centuries, when tours were encouraged to raise revenue. Although some high-minded individuals claimed a moral purpose in visiting the asylum, there is little doubt that for many this was just the lowest kind of entertainment.

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17. What a bloody racket

People believed that bloodletting was a beneficial medical procedure from as early as Ancient Greek times. In the West, the practice continued until as recently as the early 20th century. The practice finally fell out of favor among modern medics, mainly because it was ineffective and risky as a treatment. However, even today, there are those who still firmly believe in bloodletting – in India for example.

18. Deadly douches

Ruthlessly preying on female insecurities about personal hygiene, the makers of Lysol douches unscrupulously peddled dangerous products. In the 1920s, the antiseptic Lysol was sold to women as a vaginal douche which would ward off unwanted odors, infections and even pregnancy. In fact, it turned out that Lysol’s ingredients included poisonous chemicals which caused inflammation, burns and even some deaths.

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19. Dying to lose some weight

Even today, there are plenty of quack remedies on the market which promise miracle weight loss to the desperate and vulnerable. But in the 1930s, some dodgey diet pills freely available to the public were actually toxic. These tablets contained the chemical dinitrophenol which prevents food energy from transforming into fat. But the compound also stops people being able to see and can lead to premature death.

20. Hotheaded response to baldness

Men have perhaps always regretted the loss of their hair and down the ages they have desperately sought to halt or even reverse the balding process. But in the 1920s this bizarre gadget, the Thermocap, entailed rather a high level of risk for a baldness remedy. The device plugged into the mains electricity supply before being placed atop the folically challenged man’s head. Blue light and heat would then stimulate hair growth, it was unconvincingly claimed by the manufacturer. Having that much electricity surging around your skull seems more hair raising than hair restoring.