Ways of Dying in 1665

BTW, Julia, Henry has been portrayed as a randy old goat, but I don't think he was any more promiscusous than other men of his standing, and certainly far less than say an Edward VII. He tended to marry his mistresses.

I think the Anne of Cleves revulsion was based on the fact that she was as tall as she was. He liked his women small and subservient and adoring, stupid twat. Also she'd had smallpox and was scarred.

On reflection I always think Anne fared the best out of Henry's wives, aside from the humiliation factor. It was a close shave for her.

Actually I amend that to "it has never been proven that Henry VIII died of syphilis", though I imagine that after all these years that would be impossible. His behaviour in his last few years did seem syphilitic.

I'd like to know the source for Anne Boleyn cursing Henry on the scaffold. Was it contemporary?

If anyone was going to get syphilis, it would have been Henry 8th, surely?

Really? How? Mind you, I've started getting suspicious of a lot of things I was taught in history at school as more and more seem to be coming out as myths. For a start, Anne of Cleves was not ugly - many contemporaries write of her as being quite pleasing to the eye, and this includes private correspondence and people who had nothing to gain, or no reason to flatter her.

I know anthrax can survive in spore form for centuries.

But did Henry have syphilis? I thought that had been disproven?

Does anybody know how long all these bacteria, viruses etc can survive when not within a living human or animal? There's been a lot of talk of viewing books behind glass, infection from badly sealed graves, planning permission refused to build over a plague pit, not being able to dig in a battlefield, and I remember in our town there was a huge amount of fuss when a school was built on a site where a load of cattle had been buried after they died of anthrax decades before.

Is there really a chance you could catch something nasty from a relic which has been untouched for hundreds of years? Or are people just being overcautious?

That Anne Boleyn thing - another theory is that she got syphilis from Henry 8th; miscarriages/still births/infertility follow a standard pattern apparently, also seen in Mrs Beeton and thousands of others

Someone else pointed out that on the thread! That Grape was a polite version of Gropecunt Lane, which was the red light district.

Anyway. Back to more savoury things, like gangrenous hands because of human bites...

LOL!
There's a 'Grape Lane' in York that was renamed from 'Grope Lane'....

This is extremely loosely connected with this thread (thought process = Great plague-> Great Fire of London----> started in Pudding Lane) but I have just learned the following from another thread:

'Pudding' was often a euphemism for shagging, sex, gropecunting etc. So if you have a Pudding Lane near you... There is one in Norwich, and is is exactly where a Tudor whore would have made her services available (it's that little alley between St Peter Mancroft and the motorbike park at the top of the market, leads down to the steps by the Sir Garnet Wolseley for any Norvicensians who are interested)."

Fabulous nugget of information!

this thread is fab and reminds me why I wanted to become a surgeon but circumstances said otherwise.

They say that a human bite is dirtier than an animal one don't they.

I've been thinking about this thread and back to the point about deaths not being listed as due to cancer. I think many of the symptoms described by the categories they did have could in some people have been due to cancer they just didn't know. I remember my dad talking about an elderly relative who died from 'wasting'. With hindsight and knowledge we now have we think she may have had stomach cancer. Also in the days of poor hygiene people weakened by cancer would probably succumb to many of the infections that were about before the cancer killed them. 'winde' or 'griping of the guts' could be down to bowel cancer or similar I guess.

I have been thinking about this too much.

Scatter - sorry, yes - sickle cell anaemia/trait, thalassaemia and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency are also protective against malaria - which is why they haven't died out. The altered haemoglobin in the first two conditions helps to protect against the malaria parasite as well; not sure about how the G6PD deficiency works but it's protective too.

Thank you, Scatter, for adding to my rapidly-growing store of extremely random bits of knowledge!

I do genealogy and have found some interesting deaths in the burial records.

Once I found a very Cluedo style one from the 18th, something like "Killed by Mr Soandso with a Rope". Plenty of kids dying from something called "Chin cough" (whooping cough?) Recently found one in the autumn of a man who'd fallen in the river in the early summer and only just been "washed up". Another of an elderly man whose gun discharged when he was cleaning it (The vicar keenly noted there'd been an inquest). Numerous infants dying of "Worms".

Endless inquests in the 19thC describing children who died when their clothes caught fire. This was unbelievably common.

Someone mentioned the human mouth being heavily infested by bacteria. This picture proves it! Warning - it is gross, poor woman.

www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/news/local/hunt_stepped_up_for_bite_attacker_1_4173248

Definitely not that Sorry, I was in a genetics mode and not thinking!

Homo- and heterozygous, where you have two alleles ('flavours' of a chromosome) the same or different.

Sactter - het & homo? Assuming you're not talking about sexual preferences - what dat?

Just wanted to say how much I have enjoyed reading this thread and how much I have learnt
Thank you.
I remember the Anne Boleyn curse quote from school, we had an obsessed teacher who forgot the rest of the syllabus in favour of the Tudors.. My result was dreadful, but inspired a life long love of that period

I thought the protection against malaria was linked to sickle celled anaemia? So if you were het you have mild sickle cell anaemia but some resistance to malaria, but homo and you'd be likely to die from the anaemia or the malaria.

Or have I been lied to again?

So she was a witch after all