“The quest for beauty is, of course, eternal. People have been searching for simple and swift rejuvenation since before Herodotus, who, in the fifth century BC, recommended the revivifying effects of the Fountain of Youth.
Sadly, there exists no magical water that we can sip to take us back to our 20-something heyday, but that hasn’t stopped the moneyed few trying increasingly weird and wild treatments over the centuries. Let’s not dwell on the 16th-century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, who is said to have bathed in the blood of hundreds of young girls in her search for immortality.
Almost as ghoulishly, in The Blessing Nancy Mitford describes an elderly English diplomat’s feverish excitement about a new Parisian procedure. ‘They’ve all had Bogomoletz,’ he tells a friend. ‘You get the liver of a newly killed young man (killed on the roads of course, not on purpose) pumped into your liver and the result is quite amazing.’” Read More