Ways of Dying in 1665

Yes, it's true.

I was looking at a church memorial the other day and out of twelve children only two outlived their parents. The others were all carved onto the memorial as adult figures but carrying skulls (which means they'd died), and when I checked the dates, they mostly died as babies. I found the fact they were shown as adult figures very poignant.

I was told some years back that the reason average life span was so low in the past was not that the average person died at 12 or whatever but that so many babies and young children died that it skewed the figures downwards. Can't swear if that's true but sounds logical.

I think I heard you shouldn't eat really black toast, I guess it's the same thing.

I know some of the rather woo stuff like what people thought plants were remedies for back in the day, but not the actual science much.

That's it, baroness!

Jericho - I once found a beautiful text book called the Toxicity of Foods or something - I couldn't afford it though :(, it cost about £80 back in the 1980s! Loved that book - it told me all SORTS of things, I didn't eat barbecued food for a year because of the PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) that are carcinogenic. I eventually mostly got over it but make sure that I don't have blackened meats off a barbie. Still not keen though!

So that is why we were also told never to eat green crisps. And we never did, despite most bags of crisps having green ones in in the 70's.

thumb I am really enjoying your posts on fruit 'n' veg/ death here!

Baroness - the whole tomato plant apart from the fruit contains solanine, a plant alkaloid that is related to but not the same as atropine, the alkaloid found in belladonna. Solanine is also the green in potatoes and is particularly concentrated in the "eyes" (up to 200x the amount, iirc), which is why they should always be removed as well.
The domestic tomato plant of today may well have had more of the solanine bred out, to be fair - and there is also a weaker alkaloid called tomatine in the plants. In general the ripe fruits don't contain any solanine or tomatine and so are safe; but the rest of the plant does.
There are suggestions that the alkaloid is sufficiently weak that you'd need to eat pounds of the plant material to suffer; but that depends on individual susceptibility to the effects.

Let's just say I wouldn't chance it!

I'm not especially, ariel, but a mate and I saw this conference organized, and it was in a big country house-type place with croquet on the lawn and black-tie dinner advertised, so we thought we'd go - it was brilliant! But the stuff about skeletons at Towton was really sad and quite scary. He showed how a lot of the faces had been hit at an angle that showed the horsemen did a huge amount of damage to foot soldiers.

There was a really disturbing thing too about how men who were too gouty to walk were riding, too.

Loving this thread! I love the fact that there are so many icky history geeks out there!

Ah ha...fellow Wars of the Roses aficionados!

MoreBeta - did you see the skeletons they've been digging up from Towton in the last few years? I went to a conference where this guy who was a forensic scientist specializing in human bones had worked on the Towton skeletons and it was utterly fascinating. He showed that a lot of them had been hit in the face - people obviously aimed deliberately for faces. And a lot had wounds that showed they'd been kneeling or sitting when it happened. Really, really different from what we might imagine as 'knightly' battle!

Just going back to the poisonous rhubarb and tomato leaves - I grew up believing that, but now I keep seeing all these celebrity chefs roasting tomatoes still on the vine. I'm a bit about it. I really don't want stalk on my plate, but is it really poisonous or just an old wives tale then?

I've just looked at the death list for the City of London 1699-70. 1159 died of teeth.

This is just infections and abscesses that we knock on the head with antibiotics now. Dentists will tell you that bad teeth and gums can weaken your heart, which makes the availability of NHS dentistry even more of a scandal.

I often wonder why we hear so little about the Harrowing of the North. It was carnage. Must be ghosts all over the place.

MoreBeta, did you see the Branagh Henry V years ago? I thought particularly good at the archery scenes.

Oooh now death on a medieval battlefield was particularly nasty.

In the Battle of Towton 1461, the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil about 25,000 men died in 10 hours of fighting. That was 5% of the entire adult male population of the country at the time. That is equivalent to 1 million men scaled up to todays population.

First of all you were likely to be cut down in a hail of arrows. It was a lethal as machine gun fire. If you survived the archers most people at the front of the charge just got crushed or drowned in the mud.

If you survived that and actually made contact with the enemy you were likely to be cut, stabbed or bludgeoned but that wasn't really that bad because you were mainly just badly wounded. It was only after the battle that the archers (yes them again) came along to finish you off with an axe and steal your possessions. If you were a rich nobleman you were held hostage for blood money or kille dfor bounty.

If you were wounded but avoided being axed or captured you probably would die agonisingly slowly of dehydration and blood poisoning from your wounds.

Harris's List is a good read for social history fans; it's an 18th century catalogue outlining all of London's prostitues- their address, description and 'specialities' offered!

Fantastic thread - made it through all 17 pages without even noticing.

Not sure I would already be dead in 17th century but certainly maimed (badly broken arm at age 8, required re-breaking, GA surgery and pins etc) and now would probably be locked in an attic somewhere as the crazy, possessed auntie, the family's dirty secret never spoken of in Polite Company. e.g. bipolar disorder. That scene in Jane Eyre (the 1996 version) where Jane sees Mr. Rochester's wife is really disturbing because she obviously suffered from some sort of mental illness.

Back in the C17th, I would have been dead by my 10th birthday of diabetes. In fact same would have been true in the early part of the C20th.

Measles and mumps might have carried me off as a toddler. Post-partum hemmorhage would probably have done it, too. DS wouldn't have made it either, as a 31-weeker who spent 5 weeks in NICU.

My favourite ever death certificate I found while doing my family tree had as the cause of death "fell over a stile while intoxicated and dislocated neck"

I was forced to study studied Energy Through Time at GCSE history. The library had a copy of Medicine Through Time, I remember being perpetually incensed that the teacher could possibly thing energy was more interesting than medicine :o

We had exactly the same thought Endoplasmic!! Weird!

I've been to Liberia - it's poor and undeveloped beyond anything else I've ever seen.

But on a more depressing note, it makes it even more frustrating that children and mothers are still dying all over the world from completely preventable and curable diseases. Only about 30% of babies with pneumonia in low income countries even get antibiotics :( They may as well be living 100 years ago.

I found the John Snow / Broad Street pump / cholera story really interesting, people didn't realise that the water was a problem.

Still relevant today, as well - I read this article in the Guardian about Liberia, and how many lives could be saved by toilets.

www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/feb/03/liberia-sanitation-johnson-sirleaf-toilets

I am most grateful for penicillin and the knowledge about how diseases spread.
One of the saddest things when you read about the Great Plague is them killing all the cats and dogs thinking they were spreading the plague, when in fact that probably made things worse because they were helping keep the rat population down.

MrsChemist - talking of 1066, when I was a teenager we went to a large international guide camp on the field where the battle of Hastings took place. We weren't allowed to dig a cess pit just in case there were skeletons buried underground.