5 Common Fears That Only Made Sense Hundreds of Years Ago

Statistically, traveling by airplane is by far the safest form of travel. In fact, the figures show that, per journey, air travel is around 95 times safer than driving, while driving is a staggering 137 times more deadly than air travel per mile. And yet, despite the data, perhaps as many as 40% of people are thought to suffer from aviophobia—the fear of flying. 

That’s the thing about phobias, though: facts, statistics, and rational thinking might tell you one thing, but phobias are by definition irrational, so no amount of context will help. And the same thing applies to all the phobias listed below, while—although officially named and commonly cited among people today—arguably made more sense in the past than they do today. 

1. Taphephobia
2. Siderodromophobia
3. Tachophobia
4. Tomophobia
5. Mysophobia

Taphephobia

Derived from a Greek word for a grave, taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive. Historically, this grim fate was far more commonplace than it might be comfortable to admit, and the history books are full of tales of unlucky souls apparently being prematurely pronounced dead and placed in their graves despite still being alive.

Such fears eventually became so widespread that so-called “safety coffins” were invented that were fitted with various systems and mechanisms able to alert those on the surface to what might be going on below ground, if required. 

Today, however, medical science has advanced sufficiently that the chances of being mistakenly pronounced dead and buried alive are vanishingly slim—while such are the rigors of the modern embalming process that, even if you were still alive, you wouldn’t survive the standard pre-burial treatments anyway. 

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Siderodromophobia

Derived from the Greek word for iron, siderodromophobia is the name of a fear of train travel. All forms of transport (despite what the statistics might tell you) carry their own fair share of risks, of course, but this term for the morbid fear of railways was coined in the late 1800s, amid something of a moral panic surrounding the burgeoning railway industry. 

At least one concern at that time was a mysterious progressive medical condition known variously as “railway spine,” or “Erichsen’s disease,” after the Danish-born British surgeon Sir John Eric Erichsen, who first described it in 1866.

In the early days of the railways, collisions and accidents were unfortunately commonplace, and Erichsen began collating accounts of survivors of rail crashes who would come forward after the crash with vague reports of illness despite appearing perfectly well. He believed their malaise to be something similar to spinal concussion; the condition he described would now be allied with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Erichsen’s research heightened public wariness about rail travel, but there was another component to the Victorians’ worry around this newly emerging means of travel…

Tachophobia

Alongside Erichsen’s reports of people suffering a bizarre malaise after enduring train accidents, the mid-19th-century press was filled with stories of perfectly ordinary people losing their composure as soon as they boarded or traveled by a train, and descending quite unexpectedly into a wild, raving madness. Odder still, as soon as the train stopped and the journey came to an end, the madcap character would reportedly regain their senses and carry on as if nothing had happened. 

As ever more stories of these “railway madmen” broke in the press, it added fuel to a myth from the early days of train travel that claimed the human body simply was not suited to moving at the kinds of speeds modern trains were capable of.

According to the famed medical journal The Lancet, some fearmongers claimed passengers would invariably suffocate in tunnels, their respiration systems wouldn’t be able to cope with travel of 20mph or more, and that “boiling and maiming were to be everyday occurrences.” Women’s bodies in particular were figured to be especially susceptible to such high-speed travel; at 50mph, it was presumed, a woman’s uterus was in peril of simply flying out of her body, while other people postulated that the human body would simply melt at high speed.

All these (entirely groundless) fears ultimately underpinned a fear that has become known as tachophobia: the fear of speed. 

Tomophobia

Nobody wants to be unwell, of course, and likewise, few of us would admit to willingly wanting to endure invasive surgery. But the debilitating fear of surgical procedures, known as tomophobia, is a growing issue among the medical community, which can see pre-surgery patients suffering anxiety and even risking delaying or avoiding the care they require. 

Compared to the history books, however, modern surgery need not be a cause for concern, thanks to modern anesthetics, infection control, and a medical knowledge base more robust than ever before.

In the past, however, surgery would be immensely painful, with no anesthesia available, while the procedures themselves were often dangerous and unsuccessful, and riddled with potential dangers such as blood loss and post-surgical infection. In fact, it has been estimated that in the early 1800s as many as 80% of all patients who went under the knife did not survive; today, the surgical mortality rate is scarcely 1% globally (with figures for elective, as opposed to emergency, surgery tumbling to 0.1%). 

Mysophobia

Perhaps more commonly labeled “germophobia,” mysophobia is the abnormal fear of disease, infection, contamination, or general uncleanliness. The term was coined way back in 1879, but this fear has had something of a resurgence in recent years, thanks to the COVID pandemic, with mysophobia reportedly on the increase in the 2020s (and a survey in 2023 found that young people in particular are proving susceptible to worries about germs and hygiene). 

But our knowledge of infections, viruses, parasites, bacteria, and other pathogenic microorganisms today is remarkably robust compared to the history books; in fact, although the existence of germs has been assured since at least the 1600s, the idea that germs could cause disease at all was not fully accepted until the 19th century.

Before then, with little knowledge of what might actually cause a person to fall ill, all manner of mysterious forces were said to be to blame, ranging from the “miasma” theory (i.e., the inhalation of “bad air”) to evil spirits, imbalances of the humors, divine punishment, and even witchcraft.