"Three Musketeers", "Black Arrow", "Richard the Lionheart", "Romeo and Juliet" - our generation from childhood was told about the great times of the Middle Ages, with noble knights (ha-ha), ready for feats in the name of beautiful ladies (ho -ho), with romantic troubadours, gallant musketeers and luxurious palaces of the European nobility. Today's fantasy novelists continue the tradition: Tolkien's Middle-earth is read by millions of people of all ages. Refined manners, palace etiquette, knightly tournaments, the widespread cult of the "Beautiful Lady". Ah, why wasn't I born in those wonderful times? - young romantics sigh. - Why do I have to live in these boring years, when even dreams are not surprising?
Today, the level of development of a society is often determined by the average duration of human life, i.e. is directly related to the level of development of medicine, pharmacology and the entire healthcare sector as a whole. Today I invite readers to take a short excursion into the history of medieval European medicine. Our conversation will be in an entertaining form, tk. it is impossible to seriously analyze such facts - this is just a hell of a horror.
Study guide for maniacs
In the Middle Ages, medical science in Europe was absent as such. Indeed, how can you treat without basic knowledge of the internal structure of the human body? In the 14th century, the Vatican established severe punishment for anyone who dares to perform a section (autopsy) or boil a corpse to make a skeleton. European medicine of those years was based on the works of great Arab scientists - Razi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ali bin Abbas, etc. Translation of Arabic treatises into Latin was a big problem - as a result, European medical texts were full of errors and misinterpretations.
Medicine in Europe was not held in high esteem: surgeons were equated with barbers and bath attendants. Barber was trusted not only to cut, shave and pull out teeth, but even a universal method of treating all diseases - Bloodletting. Blood was allowed to everyone - both for treatment, and as a means of combating sexual desire, and for no reason at all - according to the calendar. If after bloodletting the patient felt worse from blood loss, then, following the logic of the savage "treatment", they released even more blood. And how bloodletting "helped" with the same dirty lancet during mass epidemics!
It will not be said at the table: European medicine has reached special heights in the practice of treating hemorrhoids. They treated with cauterization with a hot iron. A fiery pin in your ass - and be healthy!
But for example - a combat wound. The successful extraction of arrowheads from wounds was out of the question until the Arabs invented a special "spoon of Abulcasis". Laceration in your leg? The case is serious and requires immediate surgery. First, anesthesia: a wooden mallet over the head - and the patient is out. Fear not, dear reader! If the doctor is experienced, he will knock the patient out with one or two blows. Further, the horseman takes a rusty sword and chops the patient's leg (surgical saws have not yet been invented), then he pours boiling oil or boiling water over the stump. Ambroise Pare will learn to ligate arteries only in the 15th century and will be called the "father of surgery" for this. By the way, this story has a "sparing option" - if the doctor has an assistant, then the patient will be given "rectal anesthesia" in the form of a tobacco enema.
Well, our patient is coming to his senses after a hellish operation. By some miracle, he withstood the painful shock and avoided sepsis (blood poisoning). There is no leg, a gray smoke is billowing out of his ass, his condition is consistently grave. Now is the time to do what to him? Right! Bloodletting. If the patient is still alive, you can try to start the procedure … blood transfusion. Those. give an enema with sheep's blood. It should definitely help.
Is the patient still alive? Incredibly, it is necessary to prescribe a medicine for him as soon as possible - mercury or "emetic stone" (antimony). You can treat a patient with arsenic from a lead saucepan. If the patient still shows signs of life, then you will have to hang him by the remaining leg so that the "filth" of the disease flows out of his ears.
One of the most common diseases of those years was stagnation in the bladder due to syphilis and sexually transmitted diseases. They fought with syphilis quite simply - with the help of mercury (which in itself is already funny), but much more sophisticated methods were used to prevent urine stagnation. For example, a urine catheter, which is a steel tube inserted into the urethra. Painful, of course, but a permanent erection is guaranteed forever.
So the professionalism of medieval European healers and alchemists-pharmacists killed no less people than from wars, the Inquisition or terrible plague epidemics. As for the aforementioned plague, which decimated 1/3 of the population of France (Spain and England lost half), this is a consequence of neglect of basic hygiene.
Cleanliness is the key to health
Europe was buried in mud. The Queen of Spain Isabella of Castile (late 15th century) was proud that she had washed herself twice in her entire life - at birth and on her wedding day. The daughter of the French king died of lice. The Duke of Norfolk vowed never to wash, his body covered with abscesses. The servants waited until his lordship got drunk dead drunk, and barely washed it.
The French King Louis XIV (Sun King) washed himself only a few times in his life on the advice of doctors. The bath with water horrified the monarch to such an extent that he vowed to wash himself ever again. Russian ambassadors at the court of Louis XIV wrote that their majesty "stinks like a wild beast." The Russians themselves were considered perverts throughout Europe because they went to the bathhouse once a month - how disgusting!
Many male and female persons took pride in the fact that the water never touched their feet, except when they were walking through puddles. A bath with water was seen as a purely therapeutic procedure. Dirt is so ingrained in the brains of enlightened Europeans that in his book "New Natural Cure", Dr. F. Ye. Bilz (XIX century) had to literally persuade the people to wash. “There are people who, in truth, do not dare to swim in the river or in the bath, because since childhood they have never entered the water. This fear is unfounded, - wrote Biltz, - "After the fifth or sixth bath you can get used to it …" - Thank you, Doc! - Don’t mention it!
They looked at cleanliness with disgust. Lice were called "pearls", and exquisite sonnets about "a flea on a woman's bust" were composed. Although, everywhere there are exceptions - in sunny Spain, lice were not held in high esteem, to fight parasites, Spanish women smeared their hair with garlic. In general, with regard to female beauty, medieval Europe had its own fashion trends in this regard. Beautiful Ladies were forced to drink vinegar to give their face a delicate languid shade, their hair was bleached with dog urine. Yes, I also shuddered when I learned this unfortunate fact.
Europeans did not know toilet rooms in our usual sense. The night vase became the hallmark of Medieval Europe, and when the fetid vessel was filled, it was simply thrown onto the sidewalk under the window. After the French king Louis IX was accidentally doused with shit, a special rule was introduced for the inhabitants of Paris: when you pour the contents of a night vase into the window, you first need to shout "Beware!"
The streets of European cities were buried in mud and feces. It was then that stilts appeared in Germany - "spring shoes" of a city dweller, without which it was very unpleasant to move through the streets in a muddy road.
In the monastery of the French kings - the Louvre, there was not a single toilet (but there was a special page for catching fleas from the king during dinner parties). They were emptied wherever the need overtakes - on staircases, on balconies, in dark niches of palace rooms. Overflowing night vases stood in the bedrooms for weeks on end. It is not surprising that the French royal court regularly moved from castle to castle, due to the fact that in the former monastery there was already nothing to breathe. All for @ rally.
Another piquant moment. All girls dream of a noble knight in shining armor. But naive girls never asked the question: if it is impossible to remove steel armor on your own, and the process itself takes tens of minutes, then how did the noble knight relieve himself? The reader has probably already guessed what the answer will be.
All this, of course, is terrible, but until the beginning of the twentieth century, an even more disgusting tradition was widespread in Europe -
Cannibalism
Of course, only for medicinal purposes. It all started with the fact that the modern Australian historian Louise Noble became interested in the question: why in European literature of the 16th - 17th centuries (from John Donne's Alchemy of Love to Shakespeare's Othello) there are so often references to mummies and parts of dead human bodies. The answer turned out to be simple - the entire European society - from commoners to the most influential nobles, was treated with drugs based on human bones, fat and blood. European civilization has always been characterized by hypocrisy. Violently condemning the peoples of the newly discovered Central America for human sacrifice, the Europeans did not pay attention at all to what was happening in their homeland in the Old World.
Civilized Europeans (represented by cunning pharmacists) did not stand on ceremony: "Would you like to taste human women?" The great Paracelsus did not disdain human blood, considering it an excellent remedy for many diseases. The legendary English physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675), founder of the Royal Scientific Society of London, treated strokes with powdered crushed human skull and chocolate. Bandages were smeared with human fat during wound dressings. The French philosopher Michel Montaigne (1533-1592), in his essay On the Cannibals, prudently noted that the customs of savages are no worse than European "medical cannibals." In fact, there was a huge difference between European cannibalism and cannibalism in other cultures: the inhabitants of the Old World did not care whose blood they drank, and in the New World there was a clear social connection between the eater and the eaten.
With the development of real science, medical cannibalism gradually declined, but even at the beginning of the twentieth century, advertisements for the sale of mummies for medicines were found in the German medical catalog.
Modern Europeans are not far from their scoundrel ancestors. Suffice it to recall the trial of the early 2000s over the German Armin Meiwes, who ate a living person. The defendant did not admit his guilt, noting that his victim gave himself up to him voluntarily (just like in the time of the Aztecs!), And according to an advertisement on the Internet, he received dozens of letters from people who wanted to be eaten.
You look, soon the Europeans will completely run wild and begin to relieve themselves right in their pants, as their noble ancestors once did, clad in shining armor.
