Ways of Dying in 1665

R2Peepoo I wanted to cal DD2 Damaris,but DH wouldn't countenance it.

Roman forceps

Looks like used to remove dead babies, in surgery and for epilation/household use

Pretty impressive speculums there too

Defoe's Journal of the plague year is free on Kindle,as is an interesting book about Broadmoor and its inmates which I'm half way through.

Reading this has made me realise what a clever and eclectic lot we are.I doubt there are any other parenting websites where you can have this sort of discussion.I'm very impressed by those who actually got to work with skeletons.

I was always appalled by the girls who worked in the match factories,who suffered 'phossy jaw' where their jaws quite literally disintergrated because of the phosphorus they worked with.It was awful,because the girls knew what would happen,but worked there anyway because it was preferable to starving.

I live near a place called ' John O' Gaunt' and often wondered if it had any connection to the person.

but were the Roman ones to help deliver a live baby or just get the bits of the dead ones out?

lead used as contraception? How?

The Romans had forceps so they've been around considerably longer than since the 17th century!

But he's lovely Sarah!

Yes, R2 - agree they were very good programmes much better than some of the semi-fictional ones that pass as historical/archaeological documentaries today made for the US market that repeat themselves after every single ad-break ... Give me Michael Wood any day!

But lead was used as contraception anyway Tunip.

Dont think it was anything to do with the factory owners - it was the medical establishment and the government under the Factory Acts - there was lots of legislation being made in the 19th century to improve conditions. It is covered widely in the literature, e.g. Thomas Oliver published on it in 1914 and latterly there is Women at work By Lindsay Mackie, Polly Pattullo or Barbara Harrison's Not only the Dangerous Trades. Different rules applied to women and children.

I don't think think they were evil - just doing the best they could to earn a living in difficult circumstances they shouldnt be in.

Definitely the skeleton Myth

www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm

Mytholmroyd Really? I'll have to keep an eye out for that, I loved the original progammes. We were all brought down to the loading area bit of the archive to see the coffin and I remember thinking how amazing it was, it had such a sense of age. I was fascinated by her for a while, to the extent that when I went to university the next year my mum faithfully clipped out every news article about her and sent them to me. I'm so that you got to work on her.

My DS probably wouldn't have been here as I needed anti-D in my pregnancy with his older sister (DH has positive blood, I have negative). Thats if a childhood illness hadn't carried me off or I didn't fall down a pit/get knocked down by a horse and cart because of my sheer short-sightedness! Or if I had survived my own birth where forceps were required.

www.phreeque.com/ is a fascinating website about freak show performers from the past, demonstrating some of the then untreatable conditions that were considered 'entertaining', most of which are now treatable or treated with more dignity.

I spend more time than I should on sites like this] and [[http://www.opacity.us/ and books like this which explore old hospitals, prisons and asylums. Amazing look at places where often people spent their whole lives away from society. My favourite book is this one

In a similar vein, I wonder about the 'invention' of forceps in the 16th C. My theory is that women used forceps all through history and that they were discovered when men began to horn in on the delivery scene.

Re Florey and Chain, the issue of producing enough penicillin was the aspect of the Breaking the Mould drama that was the most surprising and interesting to me - we tend to hear about people who discovered things, rather than people who come up with processes to manufacture them in quantity, but without Norman Heatley, the chemist who came up with the way to make it, it would never have had the massive impact it did.

I wonder what the evidence was that the lead factory women were doing it deliberately.
It sounds a bit fishy to me, along the lines of teenage girls getting pregnant purely to get a council house. And bear in mind these are women who won't have had access to contraception. Seems to me that expressing horror at these evil women who are deliberately producing deformed babies might be a handy way for factory owners to distract attention from their own moral culpability in profiting from the harm done to their workers.

There have been cases of murder via forced caesarian section in the US, where crazy women have attacked pregnant mothers and cut their babies out of their wombs .

As a child I was startled to learn that the little local cottage hospital was once the workhouse of the Rathdown Union, and that in the fields behind it there were Famine pits where thousands of bodies had been buried and then covered in quicklime to speed their return to dust. Deaths in the workhouses were overwhelmingly due to cholera, typhus, typhoid and dysentery.

Yes, it was okay for men to carry on working there! The only redeeming thing is I guess, adults are much better at excreting lead than babies and children are with their immature gut. But still a health and safety nightmare - would have to continually monitor body lead burdens of workers today but didnt do it then.

Endo - I was a forceps delivery (home birth, late) and still have the indentations.

Hang on, they were banned for having toxic pregnancies? Meaning it's okay to poison the workers, as long as they don't get pregnant?

Okay then Wonder whether they would have given a stuff about the babies if the women remained sick?

I had a forceps delivery, but I reckon that was a consequence of all the other messing about they were doing in hospital, starting with induction. 100 years ago they wouldn't have induced me so I wouldn't have needed forceps. Of course baby might still be in there now, 7 years later....

They did try to get enough penicillin for the first patient by distilling his wee, but it still wasn't enough.

I enjoy teaching the bits of history of medicine we do in Biology - cholera, vaccinations etc.

Edward Jenner would certainly be struck off if he tried anything like that today....

I have a horrifying tale (well its not a tale its true and published in a medical journal) - women were banned from working in lead carbonate factories at the beginning of the 20th century when it became known that they were using pregnancy as a means to cleanse the lead from their bodies and reduce their exposure - the lead crosses over the placenta easily into the baby and the baby is poisoned and still born or was so anaemic, lethargic and brain damaged etc it didnt thrive ...

Tunip

oooh, and did we know that forceps were around for about 100 years before midwives (being, you know, women) were allowed to use them?

The skeleton or Julian Richards Sarah???

oh, how I wish you lot could come and infect some of my 'history of medicine is soooooo boring miss' year 10s!!

I sometimes use a list of medieval deaths to introduce life in the middle ages to year 7s - put them into pairs, give each pair a death and get them to come up with a freeze-frame of the death and what it can tell us about life at the time - gruesome but they LOVE it and it's such an effective way of getting them thinking really deeply about what the source tells them (you can find lots of accounts of babies being burnt by fires whilst being looked after by small children, or children falling out of barns, or becoming trapped under farming equipment, for example)

I love this thread - thank you so much for a happy hour by the fire reading such fascinating posts!

Did we do the fact that the reason that 'rose bush' man died despite being treated with penicillin was because Florey, Chain et al simply ran out? It was SO difficult to produce in any great quantity... in fact during WW2 i'm sure I read that they had to distill (or something, not too sure of the science!) soldiers' urine to get the penicillin if they'd been treated with it, it was so precious....

LOLOL Julia!