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

There have been cases of murder via forced caesarian section in the US, where crazy women have attacked pregnant mothers and cut their babies out of their wombs .

As a child I was startled to learn that the little local cottage hospital was once the workhouse of the Rathdown Union, and that in the fields behind it there were Famine pits where thousands of bodies had been buried and then covered in quicklime to speed their return to dust. Deaths in the workhouses were overwhelmingly due to cholera, typhus, typhoid and dysentery.

I wonder what the evidence was that the lead factory women were doing it deliberately.
It sounds a bit fishy to me, along the lines of teenage girls getting pregnant purely to get a council house. And bear in mind these are women who won't have had access to contraception. Seems to me that expressing horror at these evil women who are deliberately producing deformed babies might be a handy way for factory owners to distract attention from their own moral culpability in profiting from the harm done to their workers.

Re Florey and Chain, the issue of producing enough penicillin was the aspect of the Breaking the Mould drama that was the most surprising and interesting to me - we tend to hear about people who discovered things, rather than people who come up with processes to manufacture them in quantity, but without Norman Heatley, the chemist who came up with the way to make it, it would never have had the massive impact it did.

In a similar vein, I wonder about the 'invention' of forceps in the 16th C. My theory is that women used forceps all through history and that they were discovered when men began to horn in on the delivery scene.

Mytholmroyd Really? I'll have to keep an eye out for that, I loved the original progammes. We were all brought down to the loading area bit of the archive to see the coffin and I remember thinking how amazing it was, it had such a sense of age. I was fascinated by her for a while, to the extent that when I went to university the next year my mum faithfully clipped out every news article about her and sent them to me. I'm so that you got to work on her.

My DS probably wouldn't have been here as I needed anti-D in my pregnancy with his older sister (DH has positive blood, I have negative). Thats if a childhood illness hadn't carried me off or I didn't fall down a pit/get knocked down by a horse and cart because of my sheer short-sightedness! Or if I had survived my own birth where forceps were required.

www.phreeque.com/ is a fascinating website about freak show performers from the past, demonstrating some of the then untreatable conditions that were considered 'entertaining', most of which are now treatable or treated with more dignity.

I spend more time than I should on sites like this] and [[http://www.opacity.us/ and books like this which explore old hospitals, prisons and asylums. Amazing look at places where often people spent their whole lives away from society. My favourite book is this one

www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm

Definitely the skeleton Myth

But lead was used as contraception anyway Tunip.

Dont think it was anything to do with the factory owners - it was the medical establishment and the government under the Factory Acts - there was lots of legislation being made in the 19th century to improve conditions. It is covered widely in the literature, e.g. Thomas Oliver published on it in 1914 and latterly there is Women at work By Lindsay Mackie, Polly Pattullo or Barbara Harrison's Not only the Dangerous Trades. Different rules applied to women and children.

I don't think think they were evil - just doing the best they could to earn a living in difficult circumstances they shouldnt be in.

But he's lovely Sarah!

Yes, R2 - agree they were very good programmes much better than some of the semi-fictional ones that pass as historical/archaeological documentaries today made for the US market that repeat themselves after every single ad-break ... Give me Michael Wood any day!

The Romans had forceps so they've been around considerably longer than since the 17th century!

lead used as contraception? How?

but were the Roman ones to help deliver a live baby or just get the bits of the dead ones out?

Defoe's Journal of the plague year is free on Kindle,as is an interesting book about Broadmoor and its inmates which I'm half way through.

Reading this has made me realise what a clever and eclectic lot we are.I doubt there are any other parenting websites where you can have this sort of discussion.I'm very impressed by those who actually got to work with skeletons.

I was always appalled by the girls who worked in the match factories,who suffered 'phossy jaw' where their jaws quite literally disintergrated because of the phosphorus they worked with.It was awful,because the girls knew what would happen,but worked there anyway because it was preferable to starving.

I live near a place called ' John O' Gaunt' and often wondered if it had any connection to the person.

Roman forceps

Looks like used to remove dead babies, in surgery and for epilation/household use

Pretty impressive speculums there too

R2Peepoo I wanted to cal DD2 Damaris,but DH wouldn't countenance it.

Mirage . You have very good taste. Its a fabulous name. And an excellent Patrick Wolf song too.

I'm a bit late to this thread, but never mind:

Jericho - I have heard that there is an hypothesis that different infection rates of HIV between European and African populations might be because of a side-effect from the plague ? in that those Europeans who had the genetic predisposition to either not be infected at all or had milder versions and survived, might have passed on a genetic predisposition to resist infection by HIV. I think that's speculative, but there is a kind of mirror situation of African populations being genetically predisposed to counter malaria.

I do like your post about the cultural aspects of death affecting the living. There's a gap between history and science as taught in most schools/university, but there's a lot to learn from the conjunction of those two subjects.

I also think this thread needs to be moved somewhere else so it doesn't disappear, because this is a fascinating thread. I've often wished there was a "Science" area, because there are loads of knowledgeable/interested people here. To avoid cries of "Oh, no, not yet another topic!", I'd suggest that perhaps "Geeky Stuff" could be renamed to something like "Geeky and Science Stuff". I think that many people associate "geeky" with computery-type stuff, but geekiness goes beyond that.

They think Anne Boleyn might have been Rhesus -ve (or +ve, whichever Henry wasn't!) and that's why her first (Elizabeth) was the only one to survive.

That's fascinating about the plague giving immunity to HIV to some degree amongst Europeans.

By the way, did you know that John of Gaunt was actually a Belgian? He was born in Ghent, and the Ghent bit was corrupted to Gaunt. So now, when someone says "Name a famous Belgian", you can say "Actually I can!" (apart from the tennis girls obv)

Wow, just wow at this thread! I'm gripped by it :)

Unfortunately don't have anything to add to it but absolutely loving reading all the fascinating things on it. Have added lots of books to my amazon wish list and have lots of diseases to have a good google of.

MNHQ please move this to Classics, so many mines of information on here!

Yes, geekiness is a big tent.

ScatterChasse, interesting. She was supposed to have miscarried at one point I think too after Elizabeth.

Incidentally if anyone is thinking about a holiday to Crete, then you can visit the abandoned leper colony on Spinalonga Island. Horribly sad place.

He has a beard, Myth.

Yes, she had several more pregnancies, but miscarried them all. She blamed it on Catherine of Aragon cursing her, and said that her next baby after Catherine had died would be healthy, but by that point Henry was just trying to get rid of her, so she never had the chance.

It was taken orally as lead pellets or a drink (mercury also) - read it somewhere but cant find the source now.

Also used as a spermicide: Aristotle 'by annointing the part of the womb an which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or with ointment of lead or frankensense, comingled with olive oil.'

Soreanus (sic!) " It also aids in preventing conception to smear the orifice of the uterus all over before with olive oil or honey or cedar resin or juice of the balsam tree, alone or together with white lead; or with a moist cerate containing myrtle oil and white lead; or before the act with moist alum, or with galbanum together with wine; or to put a lock of fine wool into the orifice of the uterus; or before sexual relations to use vaginal suppositories which have the power to contract and to condense. For such things are styptic, clogging and cooling cause the orifice of the uterus to shut before the time of coitus and do not let seed pass into its fundus."

Yeuck - thank goodness for the pill!