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 
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Ways of Dying in 1665
TheScarlettPimpernel · 04/02/2012 11:36
Choux I think the planet thing was reference to the belief you could die from an infelicitous arrangement of the planets 
By this stage they still believed that astronomy was effectively one of the sciences, with the magician John Dee having as much status in Lizzie's court as doctors and politicians...
It was Henry 1 who supposedly died of a surfeit of lampreys, but probably fod poisoning, (or given he was a king, actual poisoning maybe)
My grandmother was very ill after the birth of her first child with 'childbed fever' - in hospital for months - this was in 1930, - also known as puerperal fever, I think its a kind of infection. I think that was probably a common cause of death for women pre anti biotics.
I remember seeing a history/forensic type programme a while ago, where they found the bones of a woman from medieval times IIRC, who had died in childbirth having triplets. One baby's bones were beside her, one baby skeleton,still in utero, and the other stuck in her pelvis
This is amazing. All I can contribute is that much later (Victorian period and even early last century) women in areas of the country with soft water (eg. Cornwall) sometimes had their teeth taken out as a wedding present from their parents, because that way their husbands would never end up refusing to pay for expensive dental treatment and leaving their wives in pain.
I would think some people must have had their teeth out routinely. In the late sixteenth century, guides to the proper pronunciation of the semi-vowels notes that you hiss the letter 's', and I've heard this might be because so many people had teeth missing.
I think canker can be cancer, btw - I have seen references to 'hidden canker' and canker of the breast.
Tympany was a swollen stomach, I think.
This is most agreeably gruesome. I may take to diagnosing from Tunips link
Beyond that is fascinating - and very sad.
Ariel I remember someone saying to me once that it's cancer that gets most of us, in the end. I guess if nothing else kills you - it's like our cells have a kind of time-bomb built in (btw I am really sorry if any of this seems callous and flippant to anyone).
I will never ever forget reading about someone being cured of the PLague in Defoe's Journal of a PLague Year. If the buboes (boils/infected glands) burst, you often survived, but they were so hard and deep they could not be lanced. One man went insane with pain and fever, and in his raving leaped out of his window into the freezing winter Thames. The action of swimming and the shock of the cold apparently burst his buboes, restored him to his reason, and he was cured
Disclaimer: if this is bollocks I don't want to be told
From that link Choux posted:
"Surfeit (choking on vomit from overindulging in food or drink, like the drummers from Spinal Tap)"
at the e.g. given!
I knew some of these but not all. Interesting stuff; and no, the cause in many cases wouldn't be elucidated until the 18th or 19th Century (or even later).
BTW, anyone that enjoys this thread absolutely MUST visit the Hunterian Museum, which is the Museum of the Royal COllege of Surgeons...amazing. AMAZING. My most favourite AWFUL thing was the pickled face of a small child that had died of smallpox. It was actually rather beautiful in a way, and so sad.
Oh God I sound like a maniac
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