Another dry sarcasm victim. If you check the link, it’s clear they were talking about a supposed contemporary concern about health effects from trains, the implication being that today people are also irrationally afraid of tech.

Problem is I’m fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case, and looks like a content farm. Might even be, ironically, AI slop itself! For example, it talks about “railway spine”: “Physicians of the time believed that the jarring motion and vibrations of train travel could shatter the nervous system, causing lasting mental and emotional distress.”

This is bullshit. As just one example of the low trustworthiness of the “article”, railway spine was the result of a train crash, a notably traumatic event, and the symptoms described are in part just PTSD, a real condition and a real concern (not normal rail travel). For that matter railway travel in those days was genuinely unpleasant (lots of vibrations and jarring movement, poorly ventilated cars, and so on) which ironically modern science would probably validate as being some kind of health risk.

I’d actually view the listed example of train paranoia a great example of historical ignorance. People of the past were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. History has some genuine examples of silly hysteria, but these are usually the exception not the rule.