September 28, 2011

Beware the Landside Upchuck!

You’re so spoiled.

When you travel, you get in a car with rubber wheels and custom shock-absorbers, and THEN you drive over smooth roads. Pitiful! 

You wouldn’t last a mile in the coaches of yesteryear. They had wooden/metal tires, useless shock absorbers, and the roads SUCKED!

So people got car sick (or “coach sick”?) all the time. They called this old school motion sickness: mal de mer sur la terre (landside upchuck).

That’s the subject of the above illustration, titled "The Cruel Effects of Interrupted Digestion." Taken from the 1826 book Inconvéniens d'un Voyage en Diligence (The Inconviences of a Stagecoach), it shows a lady on top of the coach barfing. The vomit reflects off passenger’s head and into a roadside beggar’s outstretched hat.

Yes, it’s a hat trick! Both that last joke and the above information are from BookTryst.

No comments:

Post a Comment

No bad words, thanks!