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

That's what I thought Beta.

Surely common sense says it's better to do it with hands rather than stick a massive great metal implement in there?

Forceps of one kind or another have been in use for a very long time, though. Medieval midwives had 'instruments' of various kinds. The problem is that they could easily have done more harm than good, and the baby often wouldn't survive.

I wouldn't swear to it, but I think the Egyptians had forceps.

And Scarlett - yes, it does stay with you! Disappointingly, though, I bought 'Green Darkness' which is by her and had to give up ... it was shite! It was meant to be about Celia de Bohun (descendant of Eleanor who I have a soft spot for but who is a right cow in Seton's eyes). It was just ... awful.

In reality it isn't about 'yanking' anything. Often it involves gentle pushing back between contractions and then turning the lamb, calf, piglet inside the birth canal before pulling steadily.

I dunno - my ex was a cow farmer. He reckoned you needed a lot of strength to get a dead calf out, but perhaps that is because once it's dead, you can afford to pull harder?

Just checked my notes and - pleasantly - what medieval midwives had were hooked, not flat, so you could hook out a baby but not so that it survived. Awful. But I suppose you'd be desperate if a woman were dying.

I just finished Tina Cassidy's Birth, a History and she had some pictures of some hideous looking instruments. One was long and thin, the other like a big pair of tweezers-one to puncture the baby's skull, the other to crush it so it could be removed. Then they would cut the baby into pieces and line the pieces up on a table to ensure they got it all. One of these operations took two days.

If the pelvis was ricketic then it might be impossible to give birth unless by C-Section. So you would labour until you died and they might cut you open to get the baby out. There was a really high rate of fistulas and womb prolapses as well.

Martha Ballard was a midwife in America in the 18th century. She attended hundreds of births and only lost one or two women and a handful of babies so its not all doom and gloom. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Midwifes-Tale-Martha-Ballard-1785-1812/dp/0679733760 her story here]

I just googled the history of caesareans (85% maternal death rate in 1865) and came across this incredible woman - the only known person to perform a Caesarean on herself and survive!

She did WHAT???

apparently she doesn't advise imitation of her feat

R2PeePoo - I worked on the Roman lady from Spitalfields (and on plague skeletons from the Royal Mint) - the Roman lady is going to feature in a new one-off series of Meet the Ancestors - a sort of "Re-meet the Ancestors" - that Julian Richards is doing. Should be screened this year. They are going back to discoveries from the original series and finding out what new research has uncovered about them since and what questions we can answer now that we couldnt then.

There was also a Russian surgeon who performed his own appendicectomy here julia I wouldn't recommend that either!

Oh forgot to say - great thread OP!

For God's sake don't tell Andrew Lansley

Myth

re: previous post on bad teeth - bacteria in the mouth seem to be the in thing at the moment - lots of great new research is finding things we didnt know before - tooth decay is a bacterial infection (the increased sugar makes them behave differently), stomach ulcers are a bacterial infection (although funny how that only came out when Zantac was out of patent...), heart attacks can be due to bacterial infection (linked with peridontal disease aka bleeding gums and the bacteria get into the blood stream).

identifying bacterial DNA from ancient calculus (hardened plaque on teeth) is going to be very informative about what diseases people had and how different their bacteria was at different times and places and with different diets. So I guess our ancestors uncleaned bad teeth might prove to be a good thing. (for us!)

Also, re: weights of loaves - they used to put lead salts in the bread to make it heavier and whiter (also in milk) - we see a huge increase in lead exposure in 18th/19th century children - that wont have helped survival rates.

LOLOL Julia!

oh, how I wish you lot could come and infect some of my 'history of medicine is soooooo boring miss' year 10s!!

I sometimes use a list of medieval deaths to introduce life in the middle ages to year 7s - put them into pairs, give each pair a death and get them to come up with a freeze-frame of the death and what it can tell us about life at the time - gruesome but they LOVE it and it's such an effective way of getting them thinking really deeply about what the source tells them (you can find lots of accounts of babies being burnt by fires whilst being looked after by small children, or children falling out of barns, or becoming trapped under farming equipment, for example)

I love this thread - thank you so much for a happy hour by the fire reading such fascinating posts!

Did we do the fact that the reason that 'rose bush' man died despite being treated with penicillin was because Florey, Chain et al simply ran out? It was SO difficult to produce in any great quantity... in fact during WW2 i'm sure I read that they had to distill (or something, not too sure of the science!) soldiers' urine to get the penicillin if they'd been treated with it, it was so precious....

The skeleton or Julian Richards Sarah???

oooh, and did we know that forceps were around for about 100 years before midwives (being, you know, women) were allowed to use them?

Tunip

I have a horrifying tale (well its not a tale its true and published in a medical journal) - women were banned from working in lead carbonate factories at the beginning of the 20th century when it became known that they were using pregnancy as a means to cleanse the lead from their bodies and reduce their exposure - the lead crosses over the placenta easily into the baby and the baby is poisoned and still born or was so anaemic, lethargic and brain damaged etc it didnt thrive ...

I had a forceps delivery, but I reckon that was a consequence of all the other messing about they were doing in hospital, starting with induction. 100 years ago they wouldn't have induced me so I wouldn't have needed forceps. Of course baby might still be in there now, 7 years later....

They did try to get enough penicillin for the first patient by distilling his wee, but it still wasn't enough.

I enjoy teaching the bits of history of medicine we do in Biology - cholera, vaccinations etc.

Edward Jenner would certainly be struck off if he tried anything like that today....

Hang on, they were banned for having toxic pregnancies? Meaning it's okay to poison the workers, as long as they don't get pregnant?

Okay then Wonder whether they would have given a stuff about the babies if the women remained sick?

Endo - I was a forceps delivery (home birth, late) and still have the indentations.

Yes, it was okay for men to carry on working there! The only redeeming thing is I guess, adults are much better at excreting lead than babies and children are with their immature gut. But still a health and safety nightmare - would have to continually monitor body lead burdens of workers today but didnt do it then.