'Gruesome' facts you learned at primary school

[wanderings]

Is there anything you remember learning about at primary school, as fact, and thinking "that's actually quite horrible"?

Here are some of mine which I remember, which showed my childish priorities:

Wartime evacuation; the thought of being made to leave your home like that. (Loss of life didn't even cross my mind!)

Medieval weaponry - the thought of it killing people for real.

The fire of London.

Vaccinations being weak germs put into you.

Certain punishments for children by ancient civilisations such as the Aztecs. And we thought smacking is bad enough these days!

My ds had an idiot of a teacher in Yr2 who thought it would be a good idea to explain being 'hung drawn and quartered' to 6 yr olds

Victorian diseases! I convinced myself I had them all!

Medieval torture such as the rack and hung, drawn and quartered.

The Black Death.

Henry VIII and how he executed two of his wives.

Sex education

I really got into 17th century torture when I was in year 5. Loved drawing pictures of it.

My year 2 boy told me in absolute seriousness (and I didn’t correct him) that Guy Fawkes stepped off a stage and broke his neck and died that way. Mind you, him and his friend also seem to have equated blowing up parliament = bad guys, Guy Fawkes = catholic, so catholic = bad guy. Which has somewhat alarmed his (Catholic) teacher.

They did Titanic as a topic in year 1 which whilst understandable as a local history topic strikes me as a little bit macabre.

@NoUnicornsToSeeHere Nice sanitised version of hanging!

I thought certain Bible stories were absolutely vile: Abraham and Isaac for a start (never mind Isaac, what about the poor ram?), and crucifixion: one older teacher seemed to enjoy describing this sort of stuff, while being totally deadpan, as if explaining long division. (And in the 1980s, Bible stories were practically taught to us as fact, prayers routinely said in assembly, and it wasn't even a faith school, no MN then to complain about "indoctrination".)

The same teacher told us "you have to be dead to be a saint, dead for about two years". From the way she said it, it sounded like a warning to children aspiring to a career in sainthood.

We learnt about Nazi human experimentation in yr 2 juniors which I think is yr4 now. It gave me nightmares for weeks

In case anyone's wondering, one of the ancient punishments for children I was referring to was "being held over fire of chilli peppers, and made to inhale the bitter smoke". There was even a drawing of this in the textbook.

that sounds like some sort of rugby initiation ceremony!

I vaguely remember touching on child sacrifice in some ancient 'civilisation' and being very thankful I hadn't been born then and into that culture. [Shudders]

I think the six year old might be correct about Guy Fawkes! I read recently that he flung himself off the scaffold and broke his neck rather than face being hung, drawn and quartered