Ways of Dying in 1665

[TheScarlettPimpernel]

So I'm just copying out a weekly Bill of Mortality from London, 1665 (don't ask!)

Look at some of the ways of dying - anyone care to hazard a guess at what some of them might be?!

Plague - 7165 (IN A WEEK!!!)
Childbed - 42 - just goes to show, it's all very well bemoaning medicalised childbirth/interventions/CSs but look at the alternative
Grief - 3 (Not bloody surprising - wonder what the actual medical cause was?)
Griping in the Guts - 51!
Rising of the Lights - 11 (WTF was that then? In offal, are the lights the lungs, right?)
Kingsevil - 2 (Don't ask me how I know this, but I believe this to be scrofula)
Wormes - 15 (OH EM GEE, you could die of worms )
Impostume - 11 (what?!)
Frighted - 3 (three people scared to death in a week )
Winde - 3 (Oh yeah. FARTED TO DEATH)

I realise I am a bit morbid

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

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.

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?

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!

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 know that many country people in Ireland as late as the 60s had their teeth pulled for their wedding photos. And there are people even still in the hip hop world who have their original teeth replaced with gold teeth in order to flash wealth. Samhain/mí na Samhna survives as Irish for November. Bealtaine is May (ancient pagan 'Beltane' midsummer), Lúnasa is August (Lugh being the ancient Celtic god). The yew was associated with the day before the winter solstice.

I would have died from meningitis at 11 (even in 1975 it was a close run thing) if a dental abscess hadn't killed me off at 10.

I'm shocked I'd never heard of the Harrowing of the North, Tunip! If I had heard, it must have been in passing. Most peculiar.

What a pity the Wikipedia entry seems to have been written by a teenager with a slim grasp of the events s/he references.

Oh gawd you know when you see a thread which is sure to be really interesting but you know it's going to take half an hour to read....

Just making my place for tomorrrow's "Threads I'm on" !

(are there any boring bits?????? )

Not at all historical, but I have extensively researched this tomato thing (foodie, y'see!) You would have to eat a mountain of the green stuff to get poisoned. Even if you did, the remedy is widely known - I seem to recall it involved cynaide or arsenic? I was more interested in edibility!

They've been eating Fried Green Tomatoes in the southern States for a century and even Europeans make green tomato preserves. Tomatine is the "tomato" flavour - ripening adds sweetness, but destroys the tomatine.

Now, in summer when I have the plants, I put lots of stems in my tomato dishes for flavour, then take them out when cooking's finished. It works :)

Green potatoes are generally safe but, as the toxicity varies from one potato to the next, it's best to avoid green ones. A bit of a green tinge wouldn't hurt but you need to be far more cautious with spuds than tomatoes.

I do find it odd that I'm prissy about green potatoes, while cheerfully smoking shedloads of tobacco (also a nightshade variant)

Yeah, Mary. My last post!

One of my ggggrandmother's death certificate reads 'in a ditch by the side of the road whilst in a state of weakness' We have come up with lots of theories as to what that actually means.

Another ancestor's says 'between two railway carriages at x station'

Obviously both a long time after 1665. Found quite a few interesting deaths while doing my family tree.

Cuurently on bbc iplayer is a dramatisation os Samuel Pepys Diary, which I would not normally seek out, but in light of this thread was hugely enjoyable.

would "winde" be appendicitis maybe?

SPB I thought maybe colic, but who knows?

I have a book of essays by the crime author Tony Hillerman who lives in New Mexico. One of the essays is about an outbreak of bubonic plague - some people died before they realised what it was.

Fascinating thread.