The public health menance known as "the Bicycle Face"

New technology, upending the social order, as it does....

Samuel Thompson /  DALL·E

What we call a bicycle, Victorians called a “Safety” — as opposed to the penny-farthing, which should’ve probably been called the clavicle destroyer.

Some physicians saw not Safety, but danger. Kyphosis bicyclstarum (AKA “bicyclist’s hump”), was one of a cornocopia of afflictions blamed on bike riding, along with “tachycardia…anemia and eyestrain…hysteria, neurasthenia, disorientation, sudden break-downs caused by stress, and tension due to the unconscious effect of constantly balancing.”

One of the most feared maladies, though, was “the Bicycle Face.”

The term, coined by British doctor A. Shadwell, tends to be a bit slippery. As Carl Honore explains in his book, In Praise of Slowness, during the bike boom of the 1890s, “some feared that riding into the wind at high speed would cause permanent disfigurement, or ‘bicycle face.’”

Dr. Shadwell advised his female patients to avoid biking, full stop, and not just to prevent “bicycle face.” He told the Washington State Evening Star that he observed “a healthy girl, rather stronger than average,” experience “utter collapse,” after riding 10 miles further than usual. Other ill effects he observed were "exophthalmic goitre… internal inflammation, chronic dysentery, appendicitis, headaches, insomnia, lassitude, nervous depression, and prostration.”

Though clearly a bit less uncomfortable than exophthamalic goitre or chronic dysentery, Dr. Shadwell held grave concerns about “the bicycle face.”

“Some time ago, Dr. Shadwell drew attention to the peculiar strained, set look so often associated with this pastime, and called it 'the bicycle face,’” wrote the Star. “Some have the 'face' more or less marked, but nearly all have it. 'Has anybody,' asks Dr. Shadwell, 'ever seen person on bicycles talking and laughing and looking jolly, like persons engaged in other amusements?'"

Shadwell’s colleague, Dr. Arabella Kenealy, “warned girls that too much bicycling would transform their feminine charms to masculine traits,” notes Dr. Katherine Conroy in her reflections on the phenomenon of “bicycle face.” “Worse still, ruddy cheeks from sun exposure and a strained expression in the muscles of the face could eventually result in a deterioration in the nerves,” and severe headaches.

Panic about “the biycle face,” peaked in the summer of 1895.

"It has been definitely decided by both medical and lay authorities that there is a such thing as 'bicycle face,'“ wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. “All the girls and a large proportion of the men who ride wheels in San Francisco are asking each other, 'Have I the bicycle face?'"

The paper told of one “very pretty girl,” who ventured to a cyclery. En route in a car, she was “jolly and pleasant as can be, and seemed to be satisfied with both herself and humanity.”

Important note: “She was wearing her skirts.”

After dodging into the dressing room and swapping skirts for bloomers in order to ride her bike, “she was a different girl, both facially and physically,” the Chronicle wrote.

“There were evidentlly a lot of things on her mind. She seemed to doubt the tensile strength of the thread that had been used on the hooks and eyes of her bloomers,” it said. “She feared the uncontrollable eccentricities of her wheel. She imagined that her bloomers were not half as full as they had looked when she tried them on. She wondered ‘what Jack would say’ if he saw her, and she wondered what the men that were looking at her thought, and admitted to herself that she cared what they thought — a fact that thad not bothered her before, and she asked herself fearfully whether that feeling about the knees was evidence that her bloomers were slipping up above her leggings, and nearly broke her neck looking over the curve of her knee to find out whether it was so or not, and was altogther to herself an unpleasant body, and as a result had a pronounced case of ‘bicycle face.’ The people who who looked at her were sorry, and grieved over her, because they saw the lines in her face that were likely to become permanent. And they all went off and told each other about ‘the bicycle face.’”

All this! Without even pedaling an inch.

Bicycle face, it continued, included 1. an unwholesome pallor; 2. a facial complexion of “a peculiar gray hue which betokens nervous exaustion;” 3. a facial expression that betrays “the sentimental side of that tired feeling;” 4. a look that is “yearning, anxious, hopeful, fearful, exhausted, incomplete and generally dissatisfied,” as well as “funereal,” “pained, and “strained.” And 6., at least if the anecdote above is to be believed, instant wrinkles caused by embarassment over the fit of one’s bloomers.

The only proven way to mitigate bicycle face, the paper said, was to wear skirts.

“The skirt rider has a softer tone in her expression than the bloomer girl,” it said. “The skirt is woman’s natural weapon of defense, and the bloomer so far is an untested weapon of assault. She is used to skirts, the bicycle girl, and it is admitted, feels somewhat unprotected in bloomers.”

“Johnson’s Ladies’ Walking Machine, sold in London 1818-1819, had a step-through frame to accommodate skirts.” (Wikipedia)

To explain how deeply our clothing influences our psyches, Chronicle cited a novel by Charles Reade — the scintillating British writer who penned A Simpleton and Griffin Gaunt — where the plot involved a boy dressed as a girl. His ruse is revealed when “some almonds were thrown into his lap. He brought his knees together to catch them, instead of widening them as a woman does.”

And that, it said, is why women should ride bicles in skirts, not pants.

Some, the Chronicle admitted, believed “‘bicycle face is all bosh.’” In those ranks included “a clever girl,” an “old rider,” who disained the theory that trying to maintain equilibrium on two wheels gave ladies the face of a Mesopotamian staute.

“If we all went through the streets and around the parks wearing a broad grin, the general assumption would be that the world had gone mad,” she said. “Women have been known to bear suffering with a smile, and it is more than likely that if the ‘bicycle face’ existed, it would be more apparent in the masculine countenance, because no matter what her troubles are, a woman as a rule ‘puts up a good front.’”

“The ‘new woman’ and her bicycle - there will be several varieties of her.” (1895). (Wikipedia)

Kyphosis bicyclistarium or “Bicycle Stoop”

An astonishingly medically accurate illustration of “kyphosis bicyclisstarum,” the San Francisco Examiner, July 9, 1893

In 1893, a few years before people worriedly asked each other “have I ‘the bicycle face?’” the problem of the hour was Kyphosis bicyclistarium, or “bicycle stoop,” which afflicted young men rather than young women, mostly because at that point, mostly men rode bikes.

If you think media-inflicted body dysmorphia is new, or that it’s only directed at women, check out this bit of prose from the Sacramento Record-Union: “There is no uglier subject outside a freak museum than even the handsomest young man bending in colicky curvature over the steering-bar… The chest is contracted and the lungs cramped, the spine is permanently curved and perhaps otherwise injured, and thus not only are the good effects of bicycle riding revented, but positively evil effects are brought about.”

It continued:

"Kyphosis bicyclistarium" then, being interpreted, is "bicycle-rider's stoop" and what that is none but the blind will ask. Many men, we might perhaps say the majority of men, especially if they be young, on learning the graceful and useful art of bicycle riding, appare to forget that they were made in the image of their maker and intened to be physically upright. Instead, they diligently seek to transform themselves into the image of some creeping thing. The head goes doen, the back is humped, the arms assume the posistion of fore-legs, and the once erect and graceful Antinous becomes the wretched travesty of Quasimodo.

There is no canon of art under which such a name as "kyphosis bicyclistarium" can be considered beautiful, says the New York Tribune. Speak it as you will, it is an offense to tongue and ear. But htat very fact demonstrates its fitness for existence and for use. An ugly thing should have an ugly name. And if human perversity has invented anything much ungler than that for which this verbal cacophony stands, the fact is not recorded in the annals of the closing century. Unhappily the thing itself is not as unfamiliar as its name, but obtrudes its deformity upon the outraged eye in every hour, at every turning. It one of the characteristic evils of the age, and in the name of its multitudinous victims, subjective and objective, requires immediate and severe repression.

The San Francisco Examiner came to the rescue once again, with an op/ed by Dr. James Simpson. He wrote that while exercise and fresh air are wonderful for health, obtaining them from bike-riding was like making a deal with the devil.

Bicycling, he wrote, caused "derangemments of the vital functions and oragnic changes in the bony framework of the body,” diverting the spine “from its natural form into many strange and hideous shapes." Further, he said, it was an absolutely proven fact that bike-riding caused "displacement of the organs within the chest and abdomen," as well as improper devleopment of the thoracic viscera in boys. It was a preventable evil, he said, on par with rickets.

If the case of kyphosia bicylisatrium was not too far along, Dr. Simpson said, it may be corrected by gymnastics, "muscle-beating…generous food, tonics, excercise, massage and sea baths.” A progressive case, well …

"I hope the gentlemen who skim over our pavements so smoothly and gracefully will not feel affronted when I say that kyphisis bicyclistarium is decidedly not a fashionable disease," he warned. "Rag-pickers have it most, and cobblers and miners not to far behind in susceptibility to the trouble."

Hysterioloa!

As this goofy yet horrifying YouTube clip illustrates, human beings are wired to fret about new technology. Riding bicycles counts as “slow living” now; in the 1890s, they looked weird, felt weird to ride, and threatened to upend the social order because it meant the Angel in the House changed into bloomers and took off for the park, but what park? Her husband did not know.

In the 1890s, we got “bicycle face.” In the not-so-quaint 21st century, we get the AI-pocalypse. Sober, reasonable AI experts say this new tech really will change things — it’s not a dopey, flash-in-the-pan tech scheme like crytpocurrency and NFTs — but it’s not the “end of times,” either.

Ted Goia of The Honest Broker recently wrote “Twelve Brutal Truths about AI Music,” which feels like a pretty measured take (no pun intended!) on the whole thing. Our boy Carl Honore (who inspired this post, thanks to a paragraph-share by Thomas Crone, who has a take on Honore’s work here!) gives his usual Rx for technology: slooooow dowwwwwn.

Sam Thompson, the artist who created the AI image at the top of this post, said he thinks “we're at the very beginning of a huge, but very short lived, boom in AI-generated art. So far the writing and music is terrible, but the visual stuff is promising and it's starting to pop up everywhere. The latest video from the Foo Fighters, for instance, is about half AI. And as wild and surprising as it all looks it all looks kind of like images from a surrealistic nightmare, or what people who have never taken LSD think LSD is like. There is a certain sameness to its randomness and I think the public is going to get burned out on it pretty quickly, Like Mad Libs or improv comedy, eventually you're going to miss skillfully crafted ideas. The real promise is in the second wave of AI that comes after this one, when people figure out how to harness the tools and make something deliberately and repeatedly. But for now I am enjoying the constant surprises.”

He cites this fellow as the perfect example of what he’s talking about:

This artist’s output, Sam says, would look totally at home on the cover of Heavy Metal, and he could knock out the image in an hour, “where it would have taken Frank Frazetta hundreds.  Now we have to ask the question, is this original art, like Frazetta's? Surely it can't have the same value, as we saw this YouTube guy start with other people's photographs, and finish with an AI that is built on other people's ideas pulled from the Internet. But then we have to ask ourselves where does human creativity come from? Frazetta didn't just pick his ideas out of the ether. He was a man who, like all of us, was influenced by his surroundings. He read books and watched movies, discussed ideas with his friends, cooked it all up and turned it into some amazing paintings of Conan the Barbarian. Is YouTube guy’s work as good as Frazetta's? No. But imagine what Frazetta might have done if he had access to these same tools. That's who I'm on the lookout for: the AI-wielding Frank Frazetta.”

The only thing we can do about AI, like Victorians nervously contemplating whether bicycle face was a real, is just wait and see. Though it’s already had some pretty predictable effects already: just like the bicycle, it is already making us anxious about our faces.

In the meantime, while we wait for the AI apocalypse (or not), let’s celebrate one of the most joyous uses of the human visage: Bass Face!