1717 Anodyne Necklace for Teething Children

The purported inventor of the Anodyne Necklace, Paul Chamberlen claimed that the necklace would help children’s teeth as well as woman’s labor. It is no shock that children during the eighteenth century often died as infants, and as many times during infancy the baby is teething, it may have seemed natural that the teething itself was the source of illness and death. The Anodyne Necklace was invented to simply place around a baby’s neck to prevent infant death during teething. Chamberlen deserves the last place on this list for preying and capitalizing on the grief and terror of parents who were more often than not during this period resigned to the fact that their children would be more likely to die in infancy than to make it to adulthood.