Victims include Louis XIV, who died of gangrene and had all his legitimate children die in childhood, and French finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, thought by some to be the real Man in the Iron Mask.

Some of the inventions of this science included the mud-mask-like “creation of a new skin” and these sinister looking “conformers” that re-modeled the structure of the face.

There's even a nice little horror-movie mask of electrical wires that model the face "just as iron models fabrics."