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

cholera would have been a big killer too, was that in the list

joan/jericho - didnt see the Branagh Henry V but saw a programme on the Battle of Towton. Fascinating stuff. Yes the forensic analysis of slashing downward blows from horsemen was an absolute joy.

Went to Warwick Castle a few years ago and watched the archery demonstration. The man who did it had been an ex soldier in real life as well and was brilliant on the mechanics of death by arrow. Really nice bloke too. Amazing how many arrows he could fire in a minute although he admitted he was'nt even close the real skill and physical power of a Medieval archer who all had deformed spines from a lifetime of pulling Yew bows (there is the Yew tree again).

Loving the 'death by plant' theme.

Oooo we're still going!

The Branagh Henry was almost my favourite childhood film

Scout - that's great, perfect indoor viewing for a snowy day; what's it called?

At about 3am I remembered watching The Painted Veil, the dramatisation of the Somerset Maugham book, which deals with cholera. It really showed what cholera does (and how that could maybe also have been the 'scowring' we were talking about yesterday??) - the patients laid down on beds with sort of woven rush matting and underneath were these bowls/buckets, and stuff just RAN out of them - so thin and pale they said it was like rice water No wonder you just died of dehydration in 2 or 3 days.

I've also been thinking about The Madness of George III - honestly, I know I have mentioned it before but please, I beg y'all, go and see it if you can. The main performance is astounding (I write theatre reviews so obviously see a lot of plays, and this is the best performance I have seen in 10 years) - but the way health (mental and physical) are dealt with is extraordinary. Of course we now know that George 3 probably had porphyria (because his urine was blue), and what was extraordinary was that the doctors weren't interested when his footmen pointed this out. It was totally dismissed. And the treatments they tried was essentially torture - the cupping was actually really fucking hard to watch

Echt on the 'died of teeth' thing - I think it might be even more poignant than that - someone upthread said that that is more likely to be babies having trouble being weaned off the breast and not getting the nutrition they need

Re Cholera - this map is fascinating

It's how they finally worked out it was waterborne. The little dots show cases of cholera in London in a 10 day period in 1854, and the squares show water-pumps. The cholera is clustered around a particular water pump on Broad St - Dr John Snow worked it out.

Brilliantly creepy picture of the figure of cholera pumping out water for children!

OOOo! did they do live cupping on stage, TSP?? but [fascinating]

I have a bit of a thing for toxicology of foods - it was something I really enjoyed teaching. Another thing I used to add into the mix was what happened when you gave spiders certain chemicals - these are the results - caffeine was the most disturbing!

Oh the tragedy of the cholera doesn't bear thinking about really - putting those pumps so close to cesspits, and the things that went into them! Had to research that for something I was writing, most unpleasant and yet fascinating as well. Dr. John Snow did really well but wasn't given any credence for ages. :(

I've just remembered something. Our local council actually turned down planning permission for building on a field on the edge of our village. The reason being it is the site of the plague pit.

My 18th c man wrote one letter about his kids having fever and the doctor put so many leeches on their foreheads it looked like they were wearing false hair (complete with little cartoon).

Thumb Yes they did...strapped him down, heated cups over flames, etc. etc. One hopes it wasn't actually hurting David Haig but it sure as heck looked like it

It's extraordinary how long it took the West to catch up with basic hygiene/isolation principles. I mean - if you look at the Levitical law, which is - what - 1500 years BC? - there's loads of stuff about people having 'running sores' having to be isolated from everyone else for X number of days, which was obviously about keeping infections away from the rest of the populace. And yet in 1850 a surgeons wouldn't change apron going from treating a mortally sick man to delivering a baby!

Victorians were idiots

Again it was the Industrial Revolution which essentially spawned the cholera outbreaks, the worst being in the nineteenth century. It's what gave us the London sewage system, which we've still got today.

I was thinking about that as well, Pimpers, that the Chinese and stuff seemed to know loads more about the way the body worked than we did until ages later. And so many of the seemingly archaic food laws in the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism come from basic food hygiene.

Tsp it is a radio play on radio four, i think just called diary of samuel pepys

Thanks Gem - that'll be my quiet afternoon treat

Ariel it's mad to think of, isn't it? DH was saying the other day - all those years when the Western world (mostly the British Empire) thought of other cultures - Arabic or Asian or whatever - as being essentially barbarians, and yet they were doing sophisticated medical procedures when 'we' were still slinging mud at each other in caves!

I now desperately want to study the history of medicine

'Gem'??? Where did I get that from?!

I did that in Year 9. I will be forever grateful for one history teacher in our school who was completely inspiring. There were thirty of us who chose it for A level. It makes me so sad when I see how few pupils choose history now :(

YY, too many people in too close proximity with no proper way of dealing with effluent - very very bad situation. Mind you, the Victorian sewage systems are struggling to deal with the increased load they have - my grandparents lived in the bottom 2 floors of a Georgian town house, the bottom floor being the mews and therefore below street level. My grandmother's kitchen had a "back scullery" which was a step below the rest of the floor, and had a drain cover in it. At least 3 times in the last 20 years when there has been extremely heavy rain, that drain has backed up and sewage has flooded into their back kitchen. Once, it came over the kitchen step and all through the bottom floor - thankfully that was after both grandparents had died and while no one was living in that half of the house. Shocking - but the water board said it's because of the extra pressure on the system, overloading it. They offered to put some kind of valve in, but my grandparents would have had to pay for it and it was loadsamoney, so they didn't bother.

Here ye go

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen/radio/episode/b01b9b7s/

Snow and the Broad St pump always fascinated me.I think that when he was trying to find the cause of the outbreak,he couldn't work out why a family miles away in a 'healthier' area had succumbed.It turned out that although they had moved away,they missed the taste of the water from their old pump and so had been returning to get their water from there.

The Painted Veil was serialised on Woman's Hour a week or two back,and I missed the last two episodes.I'll have to track down the book I think.

I'm loving the MN Horrible Histories

There's a village near me which was devastated by plague in 1665. The villagers chose to isolate themselves and most of them died. It's quite a sobering place to visit. Eyam

It didn't help that, for a long time Galen's ideas about anatomy (concluded from dissecting animals, not humans) were gospel.

I think they were making waves, and really studying human anatomy in Alexandria, but then that stopped when it was destroyed, putting the development of modern medicine back quite a way

another problem that people faced after the dissolution was lepers and the fact that without the monks they lost the leper colonies and were turfed out to wander the country, of course they died fairly quickly but not after passing on the disease - at the time of the dissolution, the monastries were the only form of social care avaliable, monks ran the only hospitals and also had the best knowledge of diseases and medical knowledge (although that was obviously pretty scant by modern standards) - a great deal of knowledge was given to the monks by muslims that had travelled to england during the time of the crusades, this was nearly all lost so that Henry VIII could get his wicked way with that madam Anne!

'before' passing on the disease! doh!

Saggar, Eyam! That's the place I was trying to think of earlier in the thread. I read a book many times when I was young called A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. It's told in the first person by a young woman who lived in Eyam through the outbreak and it's absolutely fascinating. If you're interested in the plague and the seventeeth century in general I urge you to read it. Scarlett, that includes you! Ignore the fact that it's supposed to be a kids' book. Here it is

The thing about Jewish law being much more on the ball about disease - Paul Binski's book 'Medieval Death' is very good on this. He's writing about the cultural perceptions rather than the gory practicalities but it is very interesting.

Basically, he says that societies like the Romans (and the Jews I guess) knew to bury their dead well away from the living, and to treat death as having a 'miasma' (the word means pollution both in a literal and spiritual sense) that surrounded it.

Christianity OTOH insisted that death was just a process, that the death could be touched by Jesus, and that a 'good' death was a saintly attribute. Dead bodies became relics or holy signs. And architecturally, places of worship changed, as did town planning. Whereas you used to have the dead buried outside the boundary, over the late Antique and early Medieval period it became customary to have graveyards inside towns and, eventually, burials and tombs not just outside but inside churches. So you get crypts and memorial tombs in the church building.

So people would be living and worshiping right by badly-sealed tombs and not-very-well-dug graves - both things that we know happen fairly often as people complain about the smell and about 'church candles'/ 'will-o-the-wisps', which are the spooky flames you get igniting over graves when the land is waterlogged and methane gas is being given off and igniting. And if you bury people inside churches/in graveyards near a church, there will only be so much space so you will have to keep digging up the graves and piling older bones into crypts to make room. It's a really easy way to get very ill.

It is sad because people thought their attitude to death was so humane, and it's part of a heritage of memorialising and grieving for the death that's a huge part of most of our lives, but it probably also killed a lot of people.

ariel I cross-posted writing my monster essay (sorry!), but I love A Parcel of patterns! It's so beautifully written, you can really hear her voice.