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

Scatter - sorry, yes - sickle cell anaemia/trait, thalassaemia and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency are also protective against malaria - which is why they haven't died out. The altered haemoglobin in the first two conditions helps to protect against the malaria parasite as well; not sure about how the G6PD deficiency works but it's protective too.

They say that a human bite is dirtier than an animal one don't they.

I've been thinking about this thread and back to the point about deaths not being listed as due to cancer. I think many of the symptoms described by the categories they did have could in some people have been due to cancer they just didn't know. I remember my dad talking about an elderly relative who died from 'wasting'. With hindsight and knowledge we now have we think she may have had stomach cancer. Also in the days of poor hygiene people weakened by cancer would probably succumb to many of the infections that were about before the cancer killed them. 'winde' or 'griping of the guts' could be down to bowel cancer or similar I guess.

I have been thinking about this too much.

this thread is fab and reminds me why I wanted to become a surgeon but circumstances said otherwise.

This is extremely loosely connected with this thread (thought process = Great plague-> Great Fire of London----> started in Pudding Lane) but I have just learned the following from another thread:

'Pudding' was often a euphemism for shagging, sex, gropecunting etc. So if you have a Pudding Lane near you... There is one in Norwich, and is is exactly where a Tudor whore would have made her services available (it's that little alley between St Peter Mancroft and the motorbike park at the top of the market, leads down to the steps by the Sir Garnet Wolseley for any Norvicensians who are interested)."

Fabulous nugget of information!

LOL!
There's a 'Grape Lane' in York that was renamed from 'Grope Lane'....

Someone else pointed out that on the thread! That Grape was a polite version of Gropecunt Lane, which was the red light district.

Anyway. Back to more savoury things, like gangrenous hands because of human bites...

That Anne Boleyn thing - another theory is that she got syphilis from Henry 8th; miscarriages/still births/infertility follow a standard pattern apparently, also seen in Mrs Beeton and thousands of others

Does anybody know how long all these bacteria, viruses etc can survive when not within a living human or animal? There's been a lot of talk of viewing books behind glass, infection from badly sealed graves, planning permission refused to build over a plague pit, not being able to dig in a battlefield, and I remember in our town there was a huge amount of fuss when a school was built on a site where a load of cattle had been buried after they died of anthrax decades before.

Is there really a chance you could catch something nasty from a relic which has been untouched for hundreds of years? Or are people just being overcautious?

But did Henry have syphilis? I thought that had been disproven?

I know anthrax can survive in spore form for centuries.

Really? How? Mind you, I've started getting suspicious of a lot of things I was taught in history at school as more and more seem to be coming out as myths. For a start, Anne of Cleves was not ugly - many contemporaries write of her as being quite pleasing to the eye, and this includes private correspondence and people who had nothing to gain, or no reason to flatter her.

If anyone was going to get syphilis, it would have been Henry 8th, surely?

I'd like to know the source for Anne Boleyn cursing Henry on the scaffold. Was it contemporary?

I think the Anne of Cleves revulsion was based on the fact that she was as tall as she was. He liked his women small and subservient and adoring, stupid twat. Also she'd had smallpox and was scarred.

On reflection I always think Anne fared the best out of Henry's wives, aside from the humiliation factor. It was a close shave for her.

Actually I amend that to "it has never been proven that Henry VIII died of syphilis", though I imagine that after all these years that would be impossible. His behaviour in his last few years did seem syphilitic.

BTW, Julia, Henry has been portrayed as a randy old goat, but I don't think he was any more promiscusous than other men of his standing, and certainly far less than say an Edward VII. He tended to marry his mistresses.

Spores are capsules and can remain dormant for decades, until the right conditions/host comes along. Building anything on an anthrax site would be foolhardy at best, just in case.

Mould spores are dangerous as well - depending on what they are, if you inhale them you could become pretty ill. Think aspergillosis (farmers' lung), even though that's usually caught from recently mouldy hay/straw etc. Inhaling any mould spores is generally not the best idea if you can avoid them (although there are airborne micro-organisms/spores everywhere around us all the time...)

Most viruses need a host to survive for any length of time but they can hang around for a while on surfaces, usually only a few days though. But many infectious agents have other hosts that they can borrow/use while they wait for their main host to come along; or they actually need the other host as part of their lifecycle (many parasites, for e.g., need two hosts - tapeworms (pigs), schistosomes (water snails), malaria (anopheles mosquitoes) - it's a very interesting topic of study, parasitology! Well, all immunology, actually)

I thought Henry VIII died of septicaemia from his gout - is that not right? And wasn't it him whose belly was supposed to have exploded?

Here are Henry's delightful symptoms:

The most famous doctors who attended Henry VIII were George Owen, M.D, Doctor Augustine and Doctor Butts. During his lifetime King Henry VIII suffered from the following health issues and illnesses:

In 1513 at the age of 22 he suffered from a bout of smallpox

In 1524 at the age of 33 he suffered the first of recurring attacks of malaria

In 1535 at the age of 44 King Henry VIII badly injured his leg in a jousting accident. 

Although the leg first appeared to have healed it reopened a few years later and became ulcerated. He was unable to take exercise and his weight heavily increased

    His height was six foot four inches

    His early armour showed a waist measurement of waist of about 34 to 36 inches indicating a weight of about 180 to 200 pounds

    His last set of armour showed a waist measurement of waist of about 58 to 60 inches indicating a weight of about 300 to 320 pounds

Eventually, both of his legs and feet became affected with ulcers

His increase in weight could also have been due to diabetes

He then suffered from insomnia, sore throats and migraine headaches

He suffered with some mental decline in later life exhibiting some paranoia, feelings of depression and loneliness and a terrible temper

He suffered from a series of strokes prior to his death possibly indicating circulatory problems and high blood pressure

His toes became gangrenous as ulcerations worsened and advanced.

Quite a catch, wasn't he?

'He liked his women small and subservient and adoring, stupid twat.'

this leads to an interesting reflection on the nature of historical certainty.

Q. Did H8 have syphilis?
A. We can't know for sure, other conditions might have caused the symptoms, some people think he did, others are not sure, etc etc

Q. Was H8 a stupid twat?
A. Yes.

Have we done Mary Tudor and her ghost baby yet???

I think I have read two possible explanations - 1) that she had a large ovarian cyst that gave all the symptoms of pregnancy etc., and 2) that it was a kind of psychotic hallucination. I've always wanted to know for sure one way or the other....

Arf at H8 being a twat. Not sure why that's funny: just is.

Yes, I also found that list while googling, ariel - very interesting, especially the possibility of type II diabetes - uncontrolled diabetes/blood sugar levels can cause many of the symptoms, including the tempers, unreasonableness, mental degradation, gangrene in his feet, slow healing (thus exacerbating his ulcers).

Found a bit that said his coffin burst open but I'm sure I remember being taught in Junior school that it was his stomach - need to go and check some more...

Fantastic thread. Gruesome & informative all at once!
The thing that always scares me, is how little pain relief there was. You'd have hideous diseases & nothing, other than alcohol to relieve the pain (until Victorian times & there was laudanum).
With regard to cankers, they were open sores, but apparently could sometimes be from cancer. So women would get a canker of the breast, which would either be from a chronically infected milk duct or also breast cancer, which had just got so huge that it had broken through the surface of the skin.

My sister who is a GP, had a lady come in once because of a pain in her breast. The lady had recently joined her daughter in the UK from Algeria. Once she had been unswathed from her layers of clothes, my sister was horrified to see that the poor lady had a huge tumour that had actually broken the surface of her skin. She said it was one of her more shocking GP moments.

I'd heard that about the exploding coffin too. Was it Edward IV? He was fat, randy glutton also.

Talking of coffins, Queen Anne's was square of course, because of her vast girth. Seventeen children and none survived childhood :(. I can't imagine hpw terrible that would have been

Oh William the Conqueror exploded too apparently. After a stomach wound went gangrenous.

Ariel - you're posting just ahead of me! - yes I found that it was William the Conqueror whose stomach exploded.

Postbellum - that's really nasty, poor woman. :( And your sister too - she must have had troubles concealing her horror, no?