One of my ancestors was a medical doctor who was responsible for accompanying the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his final resting place after his assassination. When he and the coffin crossed the Danube in the middle of the night, a thunderstorm broke loose, with lightning hitting the water left and right of the ferry, thus foreshadowing the events of the next few years.
My ancestor served in the war resulting from the Archduke’s demise, was captured by the Russians, and spent his time as a prisoner of war in the Central Asian periphery of the Russian empire. There, he became the personal doctor of a local strongman. The one photo I have of him during this time show a narrow face with big eyes.
My father had inherited some medical texts from this doctor that I sometimes looked at as a boy. They had entertaining illustrations. One I still remember was of a Lächelhalter, or a smile brace. The illustration showed a wire contraption pulling up the corners of the patient’s mouth. The accompanying text explained that the purpose was to make the patient feel cheerful by forcing them to smile.
I haven’t been able to find any sources pointing to such a device actually having existed. The medical books from my father’s library have long been sold or given away to antiquarians. Digitization of medical texts from that time, often written in the Fraktur script, which is notoriously difficult for OCR, is incomplete. The English language medical literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries doesn’t seem to discuss the smile brace either. All this leaves me wondering if I imagined this scurrilous contraption.
Nehaveigur 