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

[Urzhail64]

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

In some respects the medieval world was actually better than ours

The medieval diet isn't particularly healthy even with lords and ladies and royalty. One of the most common ailments was gout - usually referred to as the "rich man's disease" due to eating too much rich food with Henry VIII being a notable example. And by no stretch of the imagination would I call the medieval world better than ours. Life was very short especially if you were a woman with childbirth being the leading cause of death before they discovered washing your hands with carbolic acid in roughly the 1850's due to puerpal fever.

You know...dirty fingers touching the nether parts of a woman with a suppressed immune system after trying to give birth leads to bad things.

The lot of women was pretty bad back then because they were basically chattel and even getting married off as early as 10, 11 (Isabel of Hainault (The wife of Phillipe Augustus has been recorded as having been married off at the age of 11 and yes, childbirth killed her. Ditto Elizabeth of York, wife to Henry VII)

Oh, did I mention Joan of Arc was essentially burned for being an uppity woman ? (and wearing men's clothing and laying claim to men's prerogatives such as leading an army !)

 

[Thure]

Oh, did I mention Joan of Arc was essentially burned for being an uppity woman ? (and wearing men's clothing and laying claim to men's prerogatives such as leading an army !)

Eh... no. She was burned because of political reasons. She was burned by the Englishmen because she was their enemy.

 

[Urzhail64]

Eh... no. She was burned because of political reasons. She was burned by the Englishmen because she was their enemy.

While my original comment on Joan of Arc was quite tongue in cheek, one of the grounds she was condemned on was because she wore men's clothing and it's true that the English wanted her burned because they regarded her as a honest to goodness witch, heretic or false prophetess. . It didn't hurt for the English that Pierre Cauchon was promised the bishopric of Beauvais by them for carrying out the trial. And if the English thought burning her would be a political victory for them..boy...that backfired on them big time. And yes, they did point out her behavior was "hardly orthodox" for a good Christian *woman* - to paraphrase the entire trial. Tongue in cheek of course.

 

[DukeDayve]

The medieval diet isn't particularly healthy even with lords and ladies and royalty. One of the most common ailments was gout - usually referred to as the "rich man's disease" due to eating too much rich food with Henry VIII being a notable example. And by no stretch of the imagination would I call the medieval world better than ours. Life was very short especially if you were a woman with childbirth being the leading cause of death before they discovered washing your hands with carbolic acid in roughly the 1850's due to puerpal fever.

You know...dirty fingers touching the nether parts of a woman with a suppressed immune system after trying to give birth leads to bad things.

The lot of women was pretty bad back then because they were basically chattel and even getting married off as early as 10, 11 (Isabel of Hainault (The wife of Phillipe Augustus has been recorded as having been married off at the age of 11 and yes, childbirth killed her. Ditto Elizabeth of York, wife to Henry VII)

Oh, did I mention Joan of Arc was essentially burned for being an uppity woman ? (and wearing men's clothing and laying claim to men's prerogatives such as leading an army !)

I just meant that their diet was free of excessive amounts of sugar and those nasty chemicals they put in convenience food, like microwave food, which you may notice... takes about 25 years to begin decomposing because it has so many chemicals in it.

If you ate an apple in Medieval times I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been sprayed with cancer-causing pesticides first. Your bread wouldn't have 400 different man-made chemicals in it to keep it "fresh" for 7 whole days.

 

[Dr Gonzo]

I just meant that their diet was free of excessive amounts of sugar and those nasty chemicals they put in convenience food, like microwave food, which you may notice... takes about 25 years to begin decomposing because it has so many chemicals in it.

If you ate an apple in Medieval times I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been sprayed with cancer-causing pesticides first. Your bread wouldn't have 400 different man-made chemicals in it to keep it "fresh" for 7 whole days.

I think you'll find carcinogenic preservatives have been around since way before medieval times. Smoked sausage anyone? I can serve it to you on a lead plate with a lead tankard of unpasteurised milk if you like?

 

[Urzhail64]

I just meant that their diet was free of excessive amounts of sugar and those nasty chemicals they put in convenience food, like microwave food, which you may notice... takes about 25 years to begin decomposing because it has so many chemicals in it.

If you ate an apple in Medieval times I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been sprayed with cancer-causing pesticides first. Your bread wouldn't have 400 different man-made chemicals in it to keep it "fresh" for 7 whole days.

You mean processed foods ? You're right in that there wasn't really any sort of processed food in medieval times - they had to prepare from scratch.

 

[--M--]

I just meant that their diet was free of excessive amounts of sugar and those nasty chemicals they put in convenience food, like microwave food, which you may notice... takes about 25 years to begin decomposing because it has so many chemicals in it.

If you ate an apple in Medieval times I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been sprayed with cancer-causing pesticides first. Your bread wouldn't have 400 different man-made chemicals in it to keep it "fresh" for 7 whole days.

No fridge. No running water. No limits for natural poison in your food nor inspections for those. Whats with the romanticized view of ye good ol'times???

 

[Jarren]

Hospitals should be rare like the early universities that were set up in Italy.

I think that's why they are so darn expensive, and gated behind tech. Initial cost of over 400 gold to get any benefit, and if your in an early start date forget about meeting the tech requirements.

 

[schondetta]

aside from plagues i think thats a huge misnomer. the average life expectancy is just a average and is a crude estimate at best. So i disagree. In fact the opposite should be true. since your only playing one person per lifetime the likelihood of you dying from a disease should be drastically low. yet almost all your rulers and dynasty die from disease ( or at least catch something). Reapers Due is overly dramatic in this case.

 

[Woifee]

If it would be medieval farmer simulator or a medieval miner simulator I would probably agree to lower life expectations to 40 or 45.

For the high nobility or wealthy merchants not.

 

[CrackdToothGrin]

If it would be medieval farmer simulator or a medieval miner simulator I would probably agree to lower life expectations to 40 or 45.

For the high nobility or wealthy merchants not.

Go look up lists of nobility from the 700s to the mid 1400s, look at their ages, and see if you have the same opinion. Median age of death for the 150 or so I plotted earlier was 46, from all causes. Take out accidents, combat, murder, and captivity-related deaths, leaving only the illnesses and "old age" the median is only a little higher at 50.

Sure, a fair number made it to their 50s and 60s, but almost 40% of them never made it to even 40, and almost none made it past their 60s. Like, less than 4%.

That's completely leaving out infant and child deaths, by the way. The youngest age I included when I ran the numbers was, 13, I think.

You can do them yourself if you have any skill in Excel and some patience.

 

[DukeDayve]

No fridge. No running water. No limits for natural poison in your food nor inspections for those. Whats with the romanticized view of ye good ol'times???

I don't have a romanticized view of medieval times at all, they were fairly horrible. The Roman Empire between the reigns of Nerva and Commodus... now you're talking.

Although some people (like me) who were born, grew up, and live, in a large town/city where people are packed in like sardines, where no matter what time of the day or night you go outside the roads are full of cars, where you've never seen a bit of grass or patch of forest that isn't spoiled by roads on either side and/or power cables and street lights all along it... it's more of a yearning to live in a peaceful, un-spoiled world.

But one doesn't need to go to medieval times to see that. One can move to the countryside if one has sufficient conkers. Would you like to donate around 250,000 pounds of sterling conkers to my countryside dream fund?

 

[CorpusCorax]

I just meant that their diet was free of excessive amounts of sugar and those nasty chemicals they put in convenience food, like microwave food, which you may notice... takes about 25 years to begin decomposing because it has so many chemicals in it.

If you ate an apple in Medieval times I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been sprayed with cancer-causing pesticides first. Your bread wouldn't have 400 different man-made chemicals in it to keep it "fresh" for 7 whole days.

I think you'll find carcinogenic preservatives have been around since way before medieval times. Smoked sausage anyone? I can serve it to you on a lead plate with a lead tankard of unpasteurised milk if you like?

Well, food poisoning would probably cover ergotism too, which is caused by fungus growing on grains (rye, barley). In most cases peasant masses didn’t know what causes it, so black ergot could easily end up in your porridge or bread.

There are two types: convulsive, which causes painful shaking and convulsions and gangrenous, which basically causes your body parts to rot and fall of. Certainly not a comfortable way to go…

And sometimes it affected entire cities, seeming like epidemic and was called a plague.

 

[Warspock]

Yeah, the death rates are way too high after Reaper's Due. Not realistic at all.