CSI: Renaissance

benbenberi said:

A very interesting article in this summer's Smithsonian Mag. about a forensic pathologist in Italy who has examined a lot of medieval and early modern bodies (inc. some famous ones).

Short version: medieval & Renaissance aristocrats endured a much worse level of everyday health than we tend to imagine. (Status didn't exempt you from parasites, & armor-wearing from an early age predisposed noblemen to severe arthritis at an early age...) People sometimes did die unexpectedly of unglamorous natural causes, like malaria. But sometimes they killed each other with arsenic.

Just as a related addendum, I have noted in my own research on 17c French nobles that that they really were much less healthy overall than most of us are today. This isn't even including life-threatening conditions, just everyday fevers, digestive woes, abscesses, rotten teeth, etc. they mentioned in passing -- if you didn't find yourself confined to bed with some painful ailment two or three days a month you were exceptionally robust & people remarked on it.

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benbenberi said:

There's certainly some of that going on. Some people did obsess about trivial ailments, as you say. (Though in a time when people might die quickly of apparently trivial causes, they may have had some reason.) The workings of the bowels were a particular fascination in some circles: one of the people I have researched was a doting grandfather, and received weekly if not daily reports from the family doctor detailing the digestive status of the children & the quality of their stool. A lot of people routinely took enemas and purges just on general principle, which probably had an unfortunate long-term effect on them.

But there's also a lot of casual comments on the ill health of friends and associates, mention in passing of a recurrence of someone's habitual illness, etc. - notable only because it interfered with some plan or affected their appearance or troubled them more severely than usual. These were mostly people who did not consider themselves sickly, and by the standards of the day they weren't. But they assumed a much lower baseline of overall health than we tend to today.

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