If you ever think today's jobs are a bit rubbish, you should probably take in the fact you're in a warm office with other people or in a role with lots of rules designed to keep you safe.
Construction workers, for example, are now the safest they've ever been as they embark on highly complex - and very big - building projects.
You have means in place now to stop you getting stressed out, to make sure you're not too warm or too cold and laws that make sure you're not required to work for too long.
None of this existed in the past, and people had to try to make ends meet by doing disgusting, dangerous, exhausting jobs to avoid starving or freezing to death.
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Tosher (Sewer Hunter)
Toshers were people in Victorian London who earned a living by going down into the sewers and rooting through the stinking sludge to look for valuables.
These jobs were also illegal, so once you emerged from a day of sifting through human excrement, you could be arrested.
Vomit Collector
Yes, this was a thing.
It's a widely reported - and totally wrong - historical fact the Romans had "Vomitoriums".
It was said there were special rooms guests at banquets could do to vomit up their feast so they could continue feasting.
In fact, there were no rooms, but being sick to free up space was common.
And it was some unfortunate soul's job to clean it all up.
It is thought the plague killed as many as 200 million people around the world in the mid-1300s
Thousands of people were dropping dead every day and there was a constant need for the bodies to be removed.
This fell to the body collectors and the plague buriers.
Their job was to collect the dead and dying and take them off to be buried is mass graves.
This, of course, was both revolting and highly stressful, as handling the dead meant the collectors were exposed to the highly contagious disease themselves.
Rat catcher
Modern pest controllers use a number of techniques to stop rat infestations that meet a range of health and safety requirements.
In history, rat catchers were tasked with culling the animals to try to stop a repeat of the devastating outbreaks of plague seen over a 300 year period.
Catchers used animals to catch rats, but also went into infested areas themselves, meaning they were at high risk of getting bitten.
Curiously, rat catchers often operated what are now known as "side hustles" selling the animals for the grotesque "rat-fighting" industry and even breeding them.
Gong farmer
Before the invention of sewers, most homes had cesspits, basically holes where excrement was stored.
The presence of these pits meant everywhere stank.
It was the job of the gong farmer to clear out these pits and dispose of the excrement.
Even better for them is that the powers-that-be decided the public didn't want to see these people at work, so decreed the work could only be done at night.
The job involved shoveling the slurry on to carts which were then taken to sites outside the towns and cities and dumped.
You can just about imagine how smelly, dirty, unhygienic and generally disgusting this was.
