Do people not realize how shitty healthcare was in medieval times?

[aono]

Or is it mythology not having antibiotics?

Yup. At least until you don't say "any thing that should be named "antibiotic" should be chemically refined and it's mechanisms should be understood".
As archeology and anthropology say us, people used moulds long before Fleming. Greeks and Indians used it at least. They didn't know, as far as we know, that moulds kills bacteria, but evidently somewhen somebody (we don't know who) noticed that moulds makes healings better. Supposedly, "spirit explanation" was used. At least, Arab children used Peniccilium to treat horses, and it was noticed, described and explained by French physician Ernest Duchesne in 1895, 32 years before Fleming, but nobody noticed.

What would you do if you had diabetes in medieval times?

You'll get a mixture of lupine, trigonella and zedoary seed to lessen sugar excretion. It's Avicenna's recepie, not the best treatment, of course, but it works somehow. Syntetic analogue are in use even today, if Wiki speaks true (it's not exactly my sphere of expertise, and it's 4:00 in Moscow, so I can't really use library or ask specialist).

It's exactly what I mean. You get assumption that modern medicine is highly better that medieval (that's true), and use myths, such as "nobody used antibiotics before Fleming" or "nobody could treat diabetics before insulin injections" (that's not true) to defend this position. Also you use correct (as far as I know) assumptions about chemotherapy and stents, but I will not be surprised if I found that in some part of the world some natural (or alchemical-made) chemicals were used to cure cancer.
So if we're going to discuss efficiency of medieval medicine, you should know at least that two "facts" (quoted because, of course, it's interpretation that can be refuted), about natural antibiotics and pre-insuline diabetics treatment. You obviously didn't.

So I'd love to speak with arguements and evidence. If you reread my first post in this topic, you can notice - I said that every valid discussion about historical matters should include arguements and evidence. And topic starter post don't include it, so it's not valid historical arguement.

 

[napoleon_mayo]

How did people who get recurring strep not die from heart failure or meningitis before antibiotics?

 

[aono]

How did people who get recurring strep not die from heart failure or meningitis before antibiotics?

Tonsillectomy.

 

[napoleon_mayo]

Tonsillectomy.

I highly doubt the average person was able to survive a tonsillectomy let alone survive the 2 week recovery period. Also the tonsillectomy is not going to undo the damage the strep infection did to the heart.

 

[aono]

I highly doubt the average person was able to survive a tonsillectomy let alone survive the 2 week recovery period. Also the tonsillectomy is not going to undo the damage the strep infection did to the heart.

Tonsillectomy known and was used for 3000 years. Question about how they were survived is intresting enough, and I haven't exact data for recovery statistics and later heart stats after tonsillectomy in medieval times. Do you?

 

[Heiliges Thüringens Reich]

Hospitals already cost 100g and do nothing without upgrades - which are unbeliavable expensive. I don't think there's any need to mess with them right now - the DLC is what, not even a week old?

I'd wait for some months of testing before doing anything harsh.

 

[stylian]

Royalty and rich people tended to live longer due to the better food they had.

Exactly. They consumed organic food and no Coca Cola, candies or cigarettes.

 

[Sonmi]

Did you read the link? Look their medical methods and how much successfull they were. ( bloodletting ) Also i really don't understand the point of all this. The death rate of the game it's not very far from today's death rate worldwide. Most people who complain about it tell things that are wrong and without evidence. Like that most characters die before their 40s. That's totally untrue and i would really like evidence for that. Because in my games many of my characters get past their 40s. And 40s should start to be a dead zone, which is even one today. Most problems start at 40s and 50s ( especially heart attacks and cancer ) but today we have highest survival rate for the unlucky ones who may have them.

That's fine, except that people in medieval Europe could be expected to reach the average age of 64 if they got past the age of adulthood, and that's counting commoners. Whether or not the acerbated death rate is a good game mechanic is left up to debate (personally, I think it makes the game more unpredictable and challenging), but to claim that death rates that high are historical is simply burying your head in the sand.

If you want to argue in favor of the death rates, use gameplay as a reasoning, don't propagate the antique idea that people in the Middle Ages generally died at the age of 40 of poor health and disease.

 

[napoleon_mayo]

Being able to get to the age of 64 doesn't mean it was common. Just because you got past the age of 21 doesn't make you in the clear, when any random infection can kill you off. People seem to forget about all the times they have ever been given antibiotics. Yes some people never get infections and hence never go on them, but that still doesn't mean it didn't and still doesn't happen.

 

[Sonmi]

Being able to get to the age of 64 doesn't mean it was common. Just because you got past the age of 21 doesn't make you in the clear, when any random infection can kill you off. People seem to forget about all the times they have ever been given antibiotics. Yes some people never get infections and hence never go on them, but that still doesn't mean it didn't and still doesn't happen.

64 was the average, mate. That's the very definition of common, it's the age most people managed to get to before croaking whether of disease, natural causes, or violence.

64 was not the outlier, as dying at 90 or 100 would be, it was the norm.

 

[aono]

Being able to get to the age of 64 doesn't mean it was common. Just because you got past the age of 21 doesn't make you in the clear, when any random infection can kill you off. People seem to forget about all the times they have ever been given antibiotics. Yes some people never get infections and hence never go on them, but that still doesn't mean it didn't and still doesn't happen.

I believe it should be asked - you have some data about medieval medicine or you're reconstucting medieval medicine through procedure "look at modern medicine and count everybody who was healed by modern techniques as dead"?
Because said procedure is flawed as hell.

 

[DukeDayve]

Exactly. They consumed organic food and no Coca Cola, candies or cigarettes.

A diet I myself am trying to mimic today, several centuries later!

In some respects the medieval world was actually better than ours

 

[Karlingid]

mortality rates get exageratted because infant mortality was severe enough to alter the averages, if a child survived into adulthood they could expect to live to be elderly, assuming war or crime didnt kill them. yes, people died a lot more from sickness, but it wasnt to the point where nobody lived to be 40



i think the game actualy needs to tone down the non epidemic sicknesses slightly, maybe by 15%, the characters modeled in the game are noble rulers and their court after all, epidemics are fine although. The game could also make getting sick more common/dangerous for children, to reflect child mortality rates, people had lots children because half of them dying before adulthood or having stillborns was common, even for nobles.

as it stands now i can have ten children and all of them usualy live to be adults ingame.

I always say the Middle Ages don't get enough credit for not being a puritanical society of superstition and idiocy.

Don't get me wrong. There were many aspects of that, but the main reason we think this is because the only people writing things down are monks, who are inherently biased towards puritanical systems.

The Middle Ages continued the practice of public bathing from Roman times in much of Europe, and in the Mideast and North Africa, cleanliness was ritual. Islamic doctors had advanced knowledge of herbology and anatomy, with detailed drawings and descriptions, even explanations of mechanics, of various body parts, famously the eye. While the European attitude during the Crusader Era was typically to amputate or cut something, the reasoning behind this is not bad medicine, but rather because many of the Crusaders were very poor and could only hope to stop the infection, rather than cure it. The Muslims, by contrast, had much easier access to trained doctors, had above average standards of anatomical and medical practice, and ritually kept themselves clean through whatever means possible.

European folk cures amounted to things like mashing pig liver with water, and leaving it in a silver bowl for 9 days. This sounds disgusting and threatening, but believe it or not, it has scientific grounding. Silver possesses antiseptic and antibacterial properties. The pig organ and water come together to form a paste, and the silver bleeds into the paste, thus creating a disinfectant using readily available materials (A peasant could, for instance, gain a silver bowl on loan from their local church). European medicine was also ultimately extended from Roman traditions, and things like surgery were very well understood by European physicians and could often be successful.

Medieval cures could also go horribly wrong, though. Such is the case when a monk attempted trepanning and salting the brain to cure a woman of a bloody nose. This would likely induce some pretty bad things, and she would die soon after the treatment. The folk cures were often the most effective due to tradition proving so, whereas church-sponsored methods and those pushed forth officially were often harmful, as faith healing is proven to be ineffective, monks are not trained in anatomy, medicine, and the human body in general, and much of it relies on the miasma theory instead of the microbial science that folk cures attempt whether they know it or not.

 

[RoverGrover]

Could we please go at least a week without somebody making a thread about how everybody in the middle ages died at 30? Argue game mechanics all you want, but please please please can people stop posting "historical" arguments that are anything but? Seriously a 10 second trip to Wikipedia invalidates the original post.... let alone some actual real research.

 

[Oorlog]

Royalty and rich people tended to live longer due to the better food they had.

And they used silver cutlery, with silver having antimicrobial properties.

64 was the average, mate. That's the very definition of common, it's the age most people managed to get to before croaking whether of disease, natural causes, or violence.

64 was not the outlier, as dying at 90 or 100 would be, it was the norm.

Not much of a difference with today when you think of it.

 

[DukeDayve]

And they used silver cutlery, with silver having antimicrobial properties

Really? I've never heard that before, very interesting.

I was thinking more along the lines of... the rich (or those able to afford good food) would be eating a wider variety of food, more fruits and vegetables, more protein, and so their immune systems would be functioning better than the stinking peasants who ate horse dung and drank 20 gallons of warm ale per day.

 

[Thure]

Exactly. They consumed organic food and no Coca Cola, candies or cigarettes.

Candies? They did! The wealthy ones were the only ones who could get candies... because they were highly expansive. It's funny that some candies were used for medicine...

But you are right about Coca Cola and cigarettes.

 

[Båtsman]

Really? I've never heard that before, very interesting.

I was thinking more along the lines of... the rich (or those able to afford good food) would be eating a wider variety of food, more fruits and vegetables, more protein, and so their immune systems would be functioning better than the stinking peasants who ate horse dung and drank 20 gallons of warm ale per day.

Remember that the middle ages had a very limited economy. That means that if a farmer earned a surplus one year, buying silverware was a really good storage of wealth - since they could always sell it later during bad times.

Further on, beer was probably the most healthy you could drink back then. The waste disposal in medieval cities were not the most sophisticated, all the accumulated filth was usually simply swept down into the same rivers which supplied the population's drinking water. But beer is alcoholic, i.e. contains a toxin which kills bacteria. And the medieval beer contained a very small alcohol percentage, it wasn't like people walked around dead drunk all the time. It wouldn't be until the large scale importation of tea that Europeans found a better alternative.

 

[TheKingofWinter]

1. the real killer was the infant mortality rate. if you actually made it to adulthood, you had a signifigant better chance at living to old age. even in medieval times there were people who made it to 70+ years of age.

2. rich people(the kind of people that you play in CK2) generally had much better health, due to a variety of factors(better food, generally in better shape than most if they belonged to the knight/huskarl/whatever equivelant thay had in their country, etc.)

 

[JohnKR]

I am going to say one thing again. I am not saying that in medieval times most people died at their 30s. I am saying that most people had a bigger possibility to die especcialy after their 40. Not so much bigger.

My main argument is that in the game mortality is not as high as many argue here. In game many characters die at their 70s or even more. Even more characters reach their 60s. So those who argue that the death rate is to high should bring down some evidence. Most of them tell that they have many characters die from sickness, mostly cancer. Ok but at what age? And how many? Cause in my games almost 80% of times I get pass sickness with a good physician. So medieval medicine and procedures exist in the game. But they should be us effective as today? Of course not. There were not standard treatements so it was mostly to the physician and luck. But in the game how many times are effective? Enough. As i said before it's almost 80% percent with a good physician and most characters overcome their illness. Even black death is possible.

So i am not sayin that in medieval times they were dying like hell although they had a bigger mortality rate especially in wrong treatements. But i am saying that in game all these are possible and most characters live enough to reach their 60s. If they nerf that then health will just be nuisance that you shouldn't really care. Now in game it's something that kill enough to care about it but not to much to have only childs for dukes. You should look to your score or chronicle screen to see how many reach at least their 50s. Almost all of my characters and those who didn't was mostly from battle.