4. Medical Antiques and Oddities
Not surprisingly, the history of medicine left lots of strange relics behind, and there are actually people that collect them. Various quack medical devices, such as Violet Ray Generators and portable electro-shock devices, are easily sourced on Ebay and always a fun conversation piece. On the other hand, I collect a lot of weird stuff, but have personally never understood the appeal of having someone's tumor preserved in a jar on my book shelf.
There are a lot of different aspects to collecting medical oddities. Collecting this stuff might cover ground from antique teaching aids that look like something out of a horror movie, to the aforementioned "disease in a jar." To each their own I guess, I certainly can't explain the appeal of some of the weird stuff I collect.
3. Freak Show Items
Modern day America is a lot more sensitive in many ways than it might have been even a few decades ago, when a person with a horrible deformity might just appear in a traveling circus sideshow as "The Alligator Boy" or "The Two Faced Man." Nowadays, stumbling across such a spectacle is almost unheard of. It's no longer OK to exploit humans with unfortunate medical conditions for cheap thrills, and that's a good thing. I still remember having a double date to the County Fair turn decidedly chilly years ago when we visited the "Lobster Boy" attraction, lured in by colorful sideshow banners illustrating the exploits of a boy with lobster claws. We all thought it would end up being fake, because that was common too, but once we paid our admission and stepped beyond the trailer's door, we came face to face with an older man with severely deformed hands and feet sitting inside what looked like a typical cluttered single wide.
It kind of cast a pall on the rest of the night, and we felt like creeps. I didn't realize until much later that we'd met Grady Stiles, a famous sideshow performer that was murdered by a hit man his family hired a few short years later.
Anyway, there are lots of people that spend a ton of money collecting old sideshow and freak show items. The luridly painted canvas banners are particularly expensive, and generally sell for thousands of dollars. Some collectors even go so far as to track down creepy things like "Fiji Mermaids" (a monkey and fish taxidermy combo that was once common) or other items associated with the darker side of the carnival midway.
