Semi - OT: Ted Kaczynski kicked the bucket

To be honest, I had an exploding package as well. It just went off too early and without the desired result.

Debauched is a French term. But how else could you describe Madonna's life? She not only personified it, she preached it.

I've read that before! I guess nobody thought about the metal spring mattress because they were newer.

In their defense, the doctors at the time hadn't really adopted the germ theory of disease (Lister's practices weren't widely adopted yet and Koch hadn't published his work, IIRC). Unlike later charlatans that deny science they had good reason for their ignorance.

The sad thing is that during this period British doctor Joseph Lister was making headlines with his discoveries about how proper antiseptic measures like wearing gloves and using sanitized instruments helped prevent life threatening infections during  surgery.

Good call.

here's something you don't read every day...

"In other incidents, Duvalier ordered the head of an executed rebel packed in ice and brought to him so he could commune with the dead man's spirit.[25] Peepholes were carved into the walls of the interrogation chambers, through which Duvalier watched Haitian detainees being tortured and submerged in baths of sulfuric acid; sometimes, he was in the room during the torture.[26]"

i had no idea who papa doc was.  wow. 

This is the correct answer, I think.

HH Holmes, even if he was Jack the Ripper, killed about 30ish people. Not great, of course.

But that was literally just the night of March 14, 1908 for Duvalier.

"1908 (March 14): At least 27 political opponents or alleged opponents, most of them from the intellectual and social elites, were arrested and executed in the evening of March 14; some were also mutilated. Massillon Coicou, one of the most prominent Haitian poets of the early 20th century, was the first victim of the killings (his death inspired Le Poète assassiné by the French poet Apollinaire.) Coicou’s body was decapitated, then thrown into a mass grave."

All of the political and military leaders of that massacre were subsequently "tried" and pardoned.

Incidentally, the US Army's actions in Haiti while putting down a peasant uprising for Duvalier were... not great either.

"In addition to executions and violence against unarmed combatants, the US Army and its Haitian auxiliaries (the gendarmerie) allegedly committed massive killings and acts of violence against the civilian population. According to oral testimony gathered by historian Roger Gaillard (1981b, 1983), these included summary executions, rapes, setting houses on fire after gathering their inhabitants inside them, lynchings, and torching civilians alive; one local public figure was buried alive. The names, in Créole, of the US officers who committed acts of violence against civilians, are still present in collective memory in the affected areas: Ouiliyanm (Lieutenant Lee Williams), Linx (Commandant Freeman Lang) and Captain Lavoie (Gaillard, 1981: 27-71). H.J. Seligman (in Gaillard, 1983), a US journalist who investigated the occupation, asserted that US soldiers practiced “bumping off Gooks,” (shooting civilians) as if it were a sport or a shooting exercise. A 1922 internal US army report recognized and justified the execution of women and children, presenting them as “auxiliaries” of the Cacos (in Gaillard, 1983: 259)."

Yikes. Like the old saying goes, wherever there's a dictator in central or South America, the US Army is what keeps them in power (Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, etc). If HH Holmes had lived in Bolivia during the times of Operation Condor, he probably would have been given a government position by Kissinger and done a lot of the same things.

Papa Doc had somewhere between 50k and 100k people killed, many tortured before death. Unless Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Leopold, Hirohito, Mao/Xi, or Kissinger himself did a year at U of M, he's hard to beat.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-17-mn-21669-story.html