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?

Ha! My mum was anaemic when pregnant with me and was told to drink Guinness then when she had me she needed a blood transfusion due to PPH and the doctor left instructions with the ward that she was to be given a Guinness with her evening meal for the duration of her stay. This was in '81.

Same for my mum - in both Ireland and England. In fact a doctor prescribed a bit of stout for my sibling when their measles ‘wouldn’t come out’ age 7?! Worked apparently!

When I say prescribed, I don’t mean on prescription obvs!

The Guinness was to help relax and reduce stress.

To make an appreciable difference to iron deficiency you'd need to be chugging Guinness by the gallon. It's a myth that it was to provide a meaningful quantity of dietary iron.

@megosaurusrex I read a horrible account many years ago of a young soldier who was so riddled with worms they could be seen in the back of his throat, he had a grey pallor I remember.

A nice excuse to drink Guinness though.

About kidney stones: they must have been terrible to have given that surgery was so risky.

Legal types here may have heard of George Jeffreys, James II's Lord Chancellor and reputedly the worst judge in English or Welsh legal history (and the youngest when first appointed.) He had a stone, and he tried to alleviate the pain by constantly drinking weak punch. Neither would have helped his abilities on the Bench.

I work in the racehorse breeding industry, it’s still pretty common to give a lactating mare a pint of Guinness in her feed daily if her milk supply is struggling to keep up with demand. Seems to work pretty well!

That's horrendous! Poor guy!

I remember it as quoting the obscure ones and then saying how many had died from that, like falling from a bell tower on a Tuesday morning....1. It’s comedy, it’s not meant to be compassionate but I’m not going to derail an interesting thread.

I remember it as quoting the obscure ones and then saying how many had died from that, like falling from a bell tower on a Tuesday morning....1. It’s comedy, it’s not meant to be compassionate but I’m not going to derail an interesting thread.

You may well be right - and of course, you're fully entitled to your perspective on the matter, regardless. DB has mellowed quite a lot, but in the Mary Whitehouse Experience days, he used to be very abrasive - even if not in this sketch/feature.

I accept that I'm probably in a minority of one here, but I can't stand Horrible Histories, leastways the books. They just lampoon everyone from past times as ridiculous or / and stupid. They're smug, superior, and they discourage empathy with people who lived differently to now.

I prefer my history covered with a thick layer of dust anyway.

I’ve always wondered what dropsy/dropsie was. It was a common cause of death up until the ear twentieth century. The thought of many of these illnesses without modern painkillers, let alone antibiotics, is eye-watering. Having passed a kidney stone recently, the pain from that would have been horrendous and l assume this would have been large enough to cause a blockage; the same with a quinsy. As for teeth and ear infections, they could kill today if left untreated as the poison enters the bloodstream. My grandfather, as a seven-year-old, had scarlet fever in the early 1920s. It was still a terrifying disease as it could, and did in those just pre-antibiotic days, be a killer. He was not sent to a fever hospital, as was usual at the time, but stayed in one room for the duration of the illness. When he had recovered, everything in that room was fumigated and destroyed - the only way to stop the spread of infection in those days. Just one hundred years ago.

*early twentieth century.

I accept that I'm probably in a minority of one here, but I can't stand Horrible Histories, leastways the books. They just lampoon everyone from past times as ridiculous or / and stupid. They're smug, superior, and they discourage empathy with people who lived differently to now.

No, I'm (at least partly) with you there. I've no issue when they shine a negative spotlight on powerful people who abused their power and acted atrociously - and when they re-imagine things in modern times, such as having the ancient Egyptians buying things online from Nile.com! However, there is far too much sneering at ordinary people living ordinary lives for their time.

If you think about that quote about 'the past being a foreign country', it does kind of make it look quite bad, really. Presumably, they wouldn't dream of outright criticising and mocking modern-day Bedouin or tribal peoples for their simple, non-mainstream (in world terms) lifestyles, but once a few decades or centuries have passed, they may be considered fair game.

Slightly off topic here but years after my grandmother died I was looking thorough the things my father had saved and one item was my late grandma’s very old address book.
I find these things fascinating anyway so when i looked through it and found a telephone number for a convalescent home in North Wales, I was immediately I interested. My grandparents had settled in Manchester after (mostly) escaping in 1939 the horrors of being Jewish in Germany. Certainly in the 1940s the practise of sending people away after illness was very common and I discovered that my father was sent to this Home , aged three for a period of several months after having whooping cough ( I think it was anyway).

Imagine having to send off your child for weeks at a time although by all accounts it appeared my grandmother would have been perfectly happy to just phone up occasionally and leave it at that.

i do actually believe Convalescent homes should be more prevalent than they are. But that would also
require a well funded social care system so I think that non private schemes would fail anyway.

Im thinking particularly of women after childbirth or surgery who really do need to spend decent time in recovery in most cases.

As fascinating as this thread is I must get on with other things . But I just wanted to say to the historian who posted about her Masters in Early Modern England- that sounds absolutely fascinating. My DD graduated this year with a History and German degree and her dissertation was about Women ,Poverty and Crime in Early Modern London. She really was more of a Medievalist but the uni took the planned modules off due to staffing issues. Anyway, I digress.

Fascinating! And some of them are baffling, while others you can make a guess at with 21st century knowledge. Like 'Suddenly' was probably a heart attack or a major stroke and 'Jawfaln' was also possibly stroke as the left side of the body can sag. Having googled 'Planet', I was amused to see this description 'a sudden and severe affliction attributed to astrology' . Some are really tragic though - 'overlaid' means a baby was suffocated by its mother rolling onto it

I’m going to refer to croup as the rising of the lights from now on. 😁

Imagine having to send off your child for weeks at a time although by all accounts it appeared my grandmother would have been perfectly happy to just phone up occasionally and leave it at that.

It's heartbreaking, isn't it? We had a lovely friend who was very ill indeed as a child and he was also sent away to a convalescent home when he was about 7, quite some distance from his home. One day, the doctor matter-of-factly told his parents not to bother making plans to come back again to see him, as he wouldn't survive the night.

We said our final Goodbye to him a couple of years ago, just a few months shy of his 90th birthday!

My Dad was in hospital on his own for several weeks when he had his appendix removed at about 10. His parents were allowed to visit once a week.

Yes, sending DC off alone to hospital for weeks on end was quite common. My aunt had suspected TB in the early 1950s and almost got shipped off to a TB hospital on her own, but thankfully she got the all-clear. She was terrified!

When I was six, I was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. I was there for about a month. There were two visiting days, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, for an hour each time.
My Mother had a long journey there, with two or three busses to catch, but, bless her, she always managed to get there to see me.

She used to send me postcards so that I would get one every day, I've still got several of those Mable Lucy Attwell cards. She would bring biscuits or madeleines that my Dad had made for me, and hide them in my locker so the nurses didn't confiscate them.

I completely agree with this.

They might serve an entertainment function or bring history to those who wouldn't engage at all, and obviously it's more entertainment value than educational, but lots of the amusing facts were just rumour at best.

I do think we take modern healthcare for granted and forget how incredibly recently it was that things were so very different. My Dad had polio as a child, luckily surviving it with no repercussions. When I myself was a child those collecting boxes for polio survivors in the shape of a girl with a leg brace were in every High Street. That’s only a few decades ago. And my great grandfather died of lockjaw from cutting a finger on a rusty nail. How far we’ve come!

And yet, it does feel like we are regressing now with people dying due to ambulance waiting times and a crumbling NHS. We have the science and the ability, but lack the political will to maximise this. So sad. I agree with pp that bringing back the convalescent homes (but with kinder visiting rules!) would help enormously.

Children in hospital on their own - My dad vividly remembers being dropped off at hospital by my nan to have his tonsils out.

Dropped in a waiting room, his mum kissed him goodbye and walks out the door. He said he was terrified, no one told him what was happening or why he was there. He was picked up a week later (my nan said she was told he had an infection).

This was 1941, he was only 5. Could you even imagine leaving your 5 year old in that situation, you’d be at their side every second! Expectations were so different.