List of causes of Death from 1632

[Peteryougit]

I find this sort of thing really interesting. I’m sorry, I don’t have a direct link so I don’t know which region it’s from - l hope the photo attached okay.

”Rising of the lights” - any ideas?

I was conceived by ivf. So I wouldn't have been born or conceived if it was the w
1630s

The rising of the lights does sound like some spectacular annual royal event - like the military tattoo!

Rising of lights sounds like they had floaters in the eye or a migraine or something

Again perhaps an external visible symptom of something more serious /'invisible going on inside the body

Maybe that's where that idea of seeing the light when people are close to death comes from

We already know what rising of the lights is. See earlier replies.

This scene was absolutely genius :D

Fistula was well known, and early identified, and common in men. I'm sure a church father/ancient theologian suffered a fistula, survived one operation, but not a later one. I'll see if I can track it down. That would have been 5/600AD so early!

In the 80's, library books had a label in warning you of the fines if you returned a book while there was a 'notifiable' disease in the house.

It was feared that libraries were a source of disease.

I had scarletina as a child. Library books had to stay unreturned until a sufficient period was passed.

Although with our more informed medical knowledge we can see errors and weakness in their list of causes of death, they knew that there were huge gaps in their knowledge, and were desperate to learn more.
Exactly contemporary with this list, as painted in 1632, is Rembrandt's the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulip. Commissioned by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, it shows a group of surgeons watching a lecture on the muscles of the arm of a dead convict.
I wonder what those surgeons would make of our modern medical knowledge?

I took that list as what women died of in fiction although I may be wrong. I never worked out what Cathy actually died of in Wuthering Heights.

A few possibilities were hinted at. Added to the fact she starved herself briefly and was pregnant. It's all rather vague though isn't it.

just thinking when I had my son 4 years ago I ended up having an emergency c section so If I was alive in the 1600’s I would have died in childbirth. That’s if i was lucky enough to make it to then considering life back then as

I had a retained placenta when I had DS. I remember lying on the bed waiting to see if it would come out without medical intervention that many women died of this in history ( I suppose some sadly still do). Luckily I had a consultant doing a James Herriot impression to remove it!

I had this too and the operation to remove it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was under local anesthetic and I remember the feeling of rocking back and forth, I could hear voices all around me. For some reason I could hear a discussion about premature twins and the likelihood of them making it. I myself had lost a twin earlier in my pregnancy and it was devastating to hear what was going on. Completely off topic but you’ve brought back memories! Still, lucky to survive as you’ve said!

7 deaths from quinsy... I had that years ago and remember thinking it sounded like a really old fashioned illness. I felt like death warmed up when I had it, I can't imagine not having access to painkillers, antibiotics and modern medicine.

Such a fascinating thread, thank you. @countrygirl99 I have actually had takotsubo cardiomyopathy - it really is called broken heart syndrome (but it wasn’t in my case).

@batchainpuller I was stupid and refused to go to the operating theatre so had to rely on gas and air, would never recommend that!

My Gran was born in the 20s. She had 3 younger siblings (one died shortly after birth) and an older sister who she talked about often. The older sister died at 13 from appendicitis. I always thought it was so tragic, and had such an impact on my grandmother, that her sister died of something that a few decades later she would most likely have survived.

Ah god, I was given oxytocin to begin with and had contractions for what seemed like hours. Absolute hell after just having given birth!

OP where did you come across this?

Lots of people with consumption/TB.

Reckon I’d be drunk all day as well with this all around and some people’s general lot in life.

Search online for 'Bills of Mortlity', there are lots of examples available (and a project that transcribed several yearsworth of them).

^Mortality

That's what I thought of when I saw this thread :)

I feel like I have learned a lot from this thread, and it got me wondering about a few questions, like: if everyone had to drink beer in those days because it was safer than water, what did pregnant women do, did they just have to drink beer throughout pregnancy too?

It wasn't beer as we know it, instead it had a very low alcohol content, so you could drink several glasses of it with a meal, without getting drunk.
Known as small beer or the better quality product, table beer, it was drunk by everyone, including servants and children. Some schools, such as Eton and Winchester and Oxford University had there own breweries.
It was soupy in consistency, with wheat or bread fragments suspended in it, so had a nutritional value too.

It was the growth in the popularity and availability of tea, for which water needed to be boiled, that meant the end of small beer drinking.

@DavesSpareDeckChair I think the beer that 17th century poor people drank was quite a bit weaker than most beers today, but yes, I don't think there was any medical knowledge at the time that would have stopped pregnant women drinking it. Considering when I was born in the 1980s pregnant women with anaemia were still being advised by doctors to drink guinness 🤣

They would have quite happily drunk beer while pregnant. Apart from the fact that it was very low alcohol the advice for pregnant women not to drink is very recent. It was certainly considered OK when I was pregnant in 1980 although I didn't drink apart from the odd Gunness which was recommended.

I'm loving this thread. David Baddiel did a tour about 25+ years ago and analysised a chart like this. I can still remember the stitch I got from laughing so much but actually I much prefer the explanations I'm getting here.

To be fair, I remember him doing that routine, and (if my memory doesn't fail me), I'd say he was more ridiculing the people from centuries ago rather than just analysing the data and considering it from a point of historical and linguistic interest.

I must say that, much as I absolutely love Horrible Histories, many of the 'Stupid Deaths' sit quite uneasily with me. Fair enough if it was some despotic tyrant getting his just deserts, but ordinary folk from centuries ago weren't really inherently that different from ordinary folk now. I think we can actually forget that they were real people - with the same basic hopes and fears as we still have now.