You may notice quite a few homeless people around Seoul Station. A lot of visitors ask me, “Why are there so many homeless people here?” One of the biggest reasons goes back to 1997, during the Asian Financial Crisis. In Korea, we usually call it the IMF Crisis . A lot of companies went bankrupt, unemployment rose very quickly, and many people suddenly lost their jobs and income. Some people eventually lost their homes as well. And many of them came to Seoul Station . Why here? Because this was one of the main places to find day labor and temporary jobs , and it was also the main railway station if they wanted to go back to their hometowns. But some had no money left and nowhere else to go, so they stayed around the station. That is one reason Seoul Station became one of the main gathering places for homeless people after the 1997 crisis. Then another thing happened. Once many homeless people were here, churches, charities, NGOs, and the government started providing help here. Th...
How Tuberculosis Created the Vampire (And Why Garlic Was the Cure)
The image of a vampire running away from a clove of garlic is one of the most famous tropes in horror history. But this legend didn't come from a writer's imagination—it was born from a tragic combination of a deadly disease and a lack of medical science.
The Bloody Cough: The Real Origin of Vampires
In the 18th century, rural communities in the Balkans (Eastern Europe) were terrified by unexplained wasting illnesses. The biggest culprit was Tuberculosis (TB), known back then as "Consumption."
Before the discovery of germ theory, people did not understand how bacteria spread through the air. What they saw was terrifying:
One family member would die of a bloody, coughing illness.
Soon after, other family members living in the same house would start getting pale, weak, and eventually waste away.
Because they couldn't see the germs, they blamed the supernatural. They believed the first person who died was coming back from the grave at night to "feed" on the life force of their surviving relatives.
This desperate attempt to explain an infectious disease is the actual, historical origin of the vampire. It was not a monster invented out of nowhere; it was a way to make sense of a microscopic killer.
The Science Behind the Folk Remedy
So, how did garlic get dragged into this nightmare? Long before anyone talked about vampires, garlic was Europe's ultimate household medicine.
People hung garlic by their doors and wore it around their necks to fight off "bad air" (the miasma theory of disease). Interestingly, they weren't completely wrong.
The Allicin Compound: When garlic is crushed, it releases a chemical compound called allicin. This compound has genuine, proven antimicrobial and antibacterial properties.
People who ate a lot of garlic or hung it in their homes actually did seem to get sick less often.
When the locals needed a defense against the new "disease-vampire," they simply reused the remedy they already trusted to fight normal sicknesses.
A lesser-known historical fact: People were so terrified of the dead rising that they would sometimes dig up suspected "vampires" and place a large bulb of garlic directly into the corpse's mouth before reburying them, believing the strong purifying plant would trap the evil spirit inside.