Dysentery

 Dysentery, sometimes known as the "bloody flux," is a very unpleasant subject.  But it's important for medieval history because so many important people died of it.  It didn't kill millions within a short period as the Black Death did, but it was a constant concern.

Dysentery of course remains a concern today, especially in developing countries, although the most common (bacterial) form can be cleared up with antibiotics, as long as the sufferer is not too badly dehydrated.  (There is also a harder to treat amoebic version.)  It is spread through food and water that have been contaminated.  Today it remains a real threat in places like refugee camps, where people are crammed together without proper sanitation available.  In the Middle Ages, it was a constant concern in siege camps.

Think about it.  A siege involves a whole lot of men living in tents, close together, without easy access to clean drinking water or to proper latrines (no modern port-a-potties).  The people inside the castle being besieged certainly had problems, but at least they had their own well and their own "comforts" of home.

It was thus one of the reasons that powerful men, the type who would be in siege camps, often died at an age that we would consider very young (in their thirties or maybe forties).  Some notable English kings who died of what appears to have been dysentery include Young Henry, the heir to Henry II of England; King John of England (Young Henry's younger brother); and Edward I (John's grandson).  In France Louis VI probably died of dysentery (though not acquired in a siege), as did Louix IX (acquired in a siege in north Africa).

Medieval cities were acutely aware of the danger of dysentery.  Without modern urban sanitation and water processing, which are really twentieth-century developments, contaminated water was a constant concern.  You could do in your enemy by plausibly accusing him of poisoning the wells (this was one of the accusations made against Jews in the late Middle Ages).  City governments were accordingly extremely strict about anything that might lead to outbreaks of the "bloody flux."  One does not have to know about bacteria to know about infection and contamination.

We do mot know how lucky we are to be able to turn on the tap and get clean water.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Medieval Health and Hygiene

We have no idea how lucky we are in the twenty-first century to have antibiotics.  Antibiotics were developed for the first time in World War II and have been highly successful in curing bacterial diseases and infections, the things that can kill you if not treated.  Unfortunately, overuse of antibiotics has led to bacteria who are resistant to most of them, so it's possible that the antibiotic era may not even last a century.

In the Middle Ages, without modern medicine, the normal way to treat disease was to keep the sick person warm and clean, feed them chicken soup, and sprinkle them with saint dust.  With luck, their own immune system would kick in and fight off the disease.  This obviously worked better against some diseases than others; it did not work at all against the Black Death at the end of the Middle Ages.

Starting in the twelfth century, the well-to-do felt it a pious duty to endow hospitals, buildings where large rooms would be lined with beds, where the deserving poor would be cared for by nuns (in England, nurses are still addressed as Sister).  Pictured above is the hospital of Beaune in Burgundy, built in the fourteenth century.  The beds along the walls, now with red blankets, had curtains in front for privacy and a hall running behind, hidden again by curtains, where the nurses would come and go.  It is now a museum, but it continued to be the town's municipal hospital until the middle of the twentieth century.

The doctors primarily had a very theoretical idea of medicine, derived from Aristotle, though barber-surgeons had a more practical knowledge of human bodies and could set bones and cut off gangrened limbs (without anesthetics, of course).  It is probably not surprising that most people were worn out in their fifties (see my post on life expectancy).

Still, the Middle Ages did better at medicine than the Renaissance and early modern period, when it was decided that dangerous diseases needed powerful medicines.  Mercury became a popular cure.  It never worked, of course, "proving" how dangerous the disease was.

Medieval people believed in a bath every week, not because they liked being dirty, but because if one has to heat a whole tub of water over a fire, it takes a lot of water and a lot of fuel that were too valuable to waste.  We now take turning the tap for a hot shower for granted, but the weekly bath was the norm in the US well into the twentieth century.

Aristocrats bathed more frequently, even daily if they had access to hot springs, and cleanliness was a mark of elegance.  Everyone did try their best to keep their teeth clean with twigs and their fingernails free of dirt.  (See my post on medieval teeth.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

The Black Death

Everyone has heard of the Black Death, which sounds very scary, and so it should.  It's often associated  with the Middle Ages, but in fact there were only two medieval outbreaks, one in the sixth century and one in the fourteenth, that is at the beginning and end of the Middle Ages.

In both cases, the Black Death came out of central Asia (it also devastated China).  It's a bacterial disease, spread especially by fleas.  In both of its medieval manifestations, the bacteria seem to have mutated into a particularly virulent form, that then spread rapidly, especially in an urban environment where people lived close together, and where rats could serve as hosts for the fleas.  A city could be fine one day, and two weeks later three-quarters of the population would be dead.

In the sixth century, this disease broke down Roman urban culture, which did not recover until the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see my post on the medieval city).  In the fourteenth century, the Black Death marks the beginning of the Renaissance, a time when people turned to art because the economy had tanked.  (The first work of Renaissance art was a piece of literature, Boccaccio's Decameron, about people fleeing the plague.)

In both cases, the impact was devastating.  We know more about the fourteenth century than the sixth, and it's quite horrifying.  An infected ship from the Middle East came into Genoa harbor in 1346, with almost all the sailors dead, and from there one can map the spread of the disease like ripples on a pond.  Probably between a quarter and half of Europe's population died, especially in the cities.

People fled to try to escape, not realizing they were probably already infected and were carrying the disease with them.  Realizing that the disease was carried on fleas, people killed cats and dogs—whose fleas just jumped on humans.

Sometimes you'll see the Black Death compared to AIDS, but it's really not comparable.  It was easy to catch, whereas AIDS is quite hard to catch, and it killed you very quickly, whereas many people now live with AIDS for years.  In practice, probably everyone in the fourteenth century caught at least a mild form of the plague, so one could survive, but at least a third of the population did not.

The worst passed off in a few years, but it tended to keep coming back every generation or so, as children were born who had not been exposed and thus had not developed immunity.  There was a very serious outbreak in England in 1666 (well after the end of the Middle Ages), which ended only with the Great London Fire, which burned up the rats and fleas along with much of the city.

In reaction to the Black Death, some people in the fourteenth century became very pious, multiplying prayers and rituals.  Others however adopted a hedonistic, live-for-today mentality, pointing out that priests had fled from the plague just as fast as anyone else.  Art became much more morbid, and many an expensive tomb featured stone carvings on two levels (almost like bunk beds)—on one level the deceased lay clothed, looking peacefully asleep, whereas on the other the deceased was carved as naked and half decayed.

There has been some debate among scholars about whether the Black Death was the same as the bubonic plague that is still found in the American Southwest and the Sierras.  The current consensus is that it was.  Fortunately, because it's a bacterial disease (and not nearly as virulent as in the fourteenth century), it can be cured with antibiotics.

The chipmunks in the Sierras (actually golden-mantled ground squirrels, but they look like big chipmunks as you can see from the picture) carry the plague today.  No matter how cute they look, do not pat them.  And if you've been camping there and get home feeling funky, tell your doctor you have the plague (otherwise she'll probably test you for AIDS before thinking of the plague).

Click here for more on medieval views on death.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.