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Medieval Wellness Tips
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe an old phrase meaning "rabid dog" or "raged dog". Rabies was probably orders of magnitude more common of an occurrence back then (which is non-existent in most Western countries right now).
Rabies isn't that uncommon in the US - uncommon in domestic animals, sure, but I shot a likely rabid skunk a couple of weeks ago. It was out during the day, was walking at an angle, and was aggressive toward me.
That's actually completely correct, I don't know how I missed that when I wrote my comment. I've never seen a rabid animal, but I know that in the US, squirrels and bats are still a significant vector of rabies virus. It's probably not a good idea to play around with wild mammals.
EDIT: From Wikipedia:
> In wild animals, bats were the most frequently reported rabid species (30.9% of cases during 2015), followed by raccoons (29.4%), skunks (24.8%), and foxes (5.9%)[29].
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#53Not dissimilar to a couple modern wellness tips I have come across...
Well... there is this thing called fecal transplant, which some may argue works.
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rabies isn't that uncommon in the US - uncommon in domestic animals, sure, but I shot a likely rabid skunk a couple of weeks ago. It was out during the day, was walking at an angle, and was aggressive toward me.
That's actually completely correct, I don't know how I missed that when I wrote my comment. I've never seen a rabid animal, but I know that in the US, squirrels and bats are still a significant vector of rabies virus. It's probably not a good idea to play around with wild mammals. EDIT: From Wikipedia: > In wild animals, bats were the most frequently reported rabid species (30.9% of cases during 2015), followed by ra…
Apropos of nothing, several Southeastern states are currently releasing rabies vaccine in food packets to cut down on the incidence in raccoons and other wild animals.
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are one of the only animals that don’t eat poop. The benefits of poo exposure is an increased diversity of gut bacteria and biome, which we are just starting to understand the benefits of. This is one big benefit of having a dog.
> This is one big benefit of having a dog. You get to eat its poop?
It eats it's own poop and then licks your mouth, or your fingers which you then eat with.
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#56Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#57I still use many of these in my day to day life.
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#58We should keep in mind that these tips are specifically chosen because of their unusual and laughable nature, and so should refrain from attempting to generalize about the nature of medieval medicine from a biased dataset.
They also omit any reference to religion or what we would call the supernatural, both common in medical texts of the time.
More common than they are today, but there may be survivorship bias happening here - I'd imagine church-housed manuscripts would have a higher chance of surviving into the present day than random texts not church related.
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#59We should keep in mind that these tips are specifically chosen because of their unusual and laughable nature, and so should refrain from attempting to generalize about the nature of medieval medicine from a biased dataset.
Except that any historian of medicine will tell you that pharmaceuticals well into the 18th century were dominated by ideas of "potency" where surely things would have beneficial effect because they have powerful smells or whatever. Uses of animal excrement are exceedingly common in early-modern remedy guides.
I remember learning from a historian that the use of animal excrement was used for all kinds of things; for example "curing" warts. The effectiveness was of course questionable, but that didn't stop people buying in to the hype of the day.
Someone else recently posted about the Templar diet[1], and I thought that was actually quite ahead of it's time. What I find most interesting is how they could have been so ahead of the times in terms of diet and hygiene compared to the "average Joe".
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-the-templar-knigh...
Re: Medieval Wellness Tips
#60>For a man who’s been painfully beaten >Take cudweed and boil it in fine ale, and drink it first thing in the morning and last thing at night; and make the patient a bed in a pile of steaming horse dung, and lay him in it. Sleeping in a pile of horse sh*t... I don't see any hygenic problem with that, let alone the smell...
London, and other towns and cities, had a bit of a shit problem in the 1300s. Streets full of horse and human shit, households throwing their waste into the streets and/or river or if lucky selling it to a nearby cloth dyer, water dangerous to drink so best stick to beer or wine, the serious health risk from floors covered in rushes. OK, if you were posh enough there was a chute from the privvy straight into the moat…
I see, it's yet another marketing campaign by Big Shit.