If you find yourself pining for “back in the day,” when things like computers, apps, and cell phones had yet to complicate our daily lives, take a look at these images and be thankful you’re around in the 21st Century. The following medical devices uploaded to imgur look like they belong either in a medieval torture chamber or at a freak show.

Bronzing babies? The Chicago Orphan Asylum seemed to think this was a good idea in 1925 to fend off rickets in the cold season.

Walter Reed Physiotherapy Store 1920′s

Looking like a cross between raw meat, old furniture, and your creepiest baby doll, this figurine, for lack of a better word, served as a tool for teaching Italian medical students about where babies come from back in the 18th Century.

Though she hid her face, here, this woman has nothing to be ashamed of in regards to her well-crafted, prosthetic limb from the late 1800s.

Image via

No, this is not from the prop collection of the movie “Hostel.” Rather, it is a kit surgeons used during the United States Civil War.

Headgear mixed with a wheelchair, how efficient! In reality, this complex apparatus appears in an 1878 advertisement for “Dr. Clark’s” spinal alignment fix.

Another apparatus targeting the spine, Lewis Sayre’s equipment to treat scoliosis looks more like in a belongs in a dominatrix dungeon.

What appears to be an object of torture was actually a place to give birth until the 19th Century. Perhaps it could double as a toilet seat when you were done.

Though it looks like this guy was chloroformed so that his foot can be sold on the black market, he’s simply passed out due to the ether used for anesthesia in the mid-1800s for what is surely a standard surgical procedure…

First of all, what does “triple distilled” even mean in regards to water? And secondly, radioactive water? Excuse me?

This radiology nurse technician’s uniform in 1918 France would terrify any modern day patient.

So this is what a brain hemorrhage looks like… We were all wondering.

Perhaps counterintuitive, this man being stuck in the arm by a tool hooked up to an electrical machine is actually having a neurological test in the late 19th Century.

It’s Pinocchio! Or an artificial hand made of wood that people used around 1800.

Clever disguises…if you had a disfiguring injury on your face about a century ago. I’m sure these were all totally convincing. Way more life-like than the mustache-nose-glasses set you can get as a prize at the dentist’s office these days.

This prosthetic leg would fit right in at any antique shop or ancient neighbor’s garage sale.

Brought to you by England as late as thirty-five years ago, this bottle for blood transfusions would make anyone a little nervous in the hospital waiting room.

The oldest piece of medical equipment in this collection, this mask worn by doctors who treated the plague did not aim to terrify patients into health. What may look like required garb for coven membership actually held scented materials to protect physicians from “bad air.” That’s a pretty decent touch for people living in constant fear of the Black Death.