The King in the Car Park Had Worms

Posted

Wenceslas_Hollar_-_Richard_IIIPoor Richard.

Richard III, I mean, the last of the Plantagenet kings (1452 – 1485). He’s the one who’s been very much in the news lately, because they found his remains beneath a car park in Leicester, England.

He also has a terrible reputation. He’s the guy Shakespeare called a “poisonous bunch-backed toad,” and “that foul defacer of God’s handiwork,” and who was said to have murdered his two little nephews in the Tower in a bloody ascension to the throne. I blogged about him here.

Now the latest news is that not only was he “one of England’s most despised monarchs,” he also had—brace yourself—intestinal parasites.

My brother, Luke, sent me this article about foot-long roundworms. His email subject line was lovingly entitled: “This reminded me of you.” (I get such emails and links a lot from my friends and family. Anything gross or poop- or infectious-disease related. Which makes me happy—please keep ‘em coming, friends and family.)

The article says that archaeologists found roundworm eggs in the soil around his pelvis, near where his intestines would have been. Say or think what you will about RIII, but the fact that he was afflicted with intestinal worms is not all that shocking. Pretty much everyone had them, before antibiotics became part of the arsenal of modern living. In fact, although no one thinks it’s good to have worms, many legit scientists believe that our lack of parasites nowadays has caused our immune systems to go haywire, and may be a major factor in why autoimmune problems, including allergies and asthma, are so rampant in modern western societies.

(You can read more about parasitic worms in my upcoming book, coming out next year. See what you have to look forward to?)

 

Richard III, Wenceslaus Hollar (1607 – 1677) from University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection

Do Not Call On Me

Posted

mayhew-33I work at home, and despite being on the ‘do not call’ list, I get a lot of telemarketing calls. I have found myself thinking that it must have been so much easier in the good old days, before telephones—and texts—were a constant source of interruption. But actually, the recent past may have been just as bad, in a different way.

I was reading Judith Flanders’ Inside the Victorian Home recently, and she recounts the testimony in 1872 of a London man (who also worked at home) summoned by the local magistrate for assaulting a peddler woman who had come to his door three times in one day (evidently he physically removed her from his stoop). The man reported that as many as 38 persons in one day habitually came to his door and rang his bell, including (and these are identified by what the peddlers cried out) “’rags and bones,’ ‘Crockery,’ ‘Sixpence a peck, peas,’ ‘Fine young rabbits,’ ‘Roots all a-blowing, all a growing,’ ‘Crochet mats, slippers, writing-paper.’”

The magistrate, who also worked from home it seems, acquitted the man. (398)

Lumpensammler

 

Images: Dust Man, Rag and Bone Man, via Wiki

Wordsmith

Posted

It took seven years for Samuel Johnson to write his English dictionary, published in 1750. It contained 40,000 words and definitions.

The Grind

Posted

Early tooth powders from the 1840s were made from various mixtures of ground-up coral, cuttlefish bone, eggshells, or porcelain.

 

Who Wore the Pants?

Posted

In my book about the history of toilets, I pointed out that historically, the style of toilets has been dictated by male fashions. In cultures where men wore robes that could be hiked up–such as togas, or chitons, or kaftans– toilets tended to be the squatting variety. In cultures where men wore trousers or hose that had to be pulled down, toilets tended to be the sitting type (ie close stools and garderobes).

Which leads to the question: When were pants first worn? Worry not, Dear Reader–I’ve done some research.

Loose trousers were first worn in the 6th century BC when the Persians conquered the Babylonians. Roman togas had gone out of style by this point. The Persian conquerors came from the mountains of what is now called Turkistan, so they wore cold-weather clothes, including, for both men and women, trousers.* I’ve blogged before about the trouser-wearing, semi-nomadic warrior tribes the Romans considered barbarians. But I hadn’t found a decent shot of someone wearing pants before now. Here’s a pretty good example of a Scythian warrior sporting the style:

Skythian_archer_BM_E135

High-ranking women in the Persian empire signaled their social rank by wearing voluminous layers of trousers. When a European woman was presented at the Persian court wearing a floor-length dress, they at first believed she had lost a leg. **

 

 

* James Laver, Costume and Fashion, page 15
** Batterberry, M and A, Mirror, Mirror: A Social History of Fashion page 63.
image: 
By English: Epiktetos (signed) Français : Épictète (signature) (Jastrow (2006)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Chip Off the Old Block

Posted

Lincoln Logs were created in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, the son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Death by Ear

Posted

I was in New York last week, walking along a street in Soho, when this picture on a salon door caught my eye.IMG_1448

No, this is not a picture of a crime scene. It’s a hollow candle, and they light the end that isn’t in your ear, and the idea is that the heat from the candle creates a suction that draws the wax out of your ear. It’s also, somehow, supposed to help with your sinus infection and general hearing.

Doctors hate this thing, because all kinds of injuries can happen during “candling,” including a ruptured eardrum. Here’s the Mayo Clinic’s warning,and the FDA’s.

Tympanic membrane perforation is pretty common—it’s nasty to think about a ruptured eardrum, but the membrane separating your outer ear from your inner ear is pretty thin, and not that hard to rupture. It happens to little kids with bad ear infections, or to soldiers too close to a blast (acoustic trauma), or to people in an airplane who experience a sudden drop in pressure. Usually the ear heals on its own.

This ear candle gizmo reminds me of the way  Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father–by pouring poison into “the porches of” his ear.

0705r

Sleeping within mine orchard, My custom always in the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebona in a vial, And in the porches of mine ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such as enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine: And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body.

How did Shakespeare dream this stuff up, I have often wondered (well I mean, besides the fact that he’s Shakespeare and all)? It would have taken a pretty sophisticated understanding of how the ear is connected to the throat to realize henbane in the ear is a plausible way to off someone.

Turns out, there’s a pile of newspaper  and scholarly articles about this very subject.

Pouring a quick-acting poison into someone’s ear is an ingenious and difficult-to-trace crime. The Elizabethans had just discovered the presence of Eustachian tubes, which connect the ear and the throat, thanks to Bartolommeo Eustachio. Hamlet’s father could have been suffering from a tympanic membrane perforation, or, Claudius could easily have punctured it with the funnel he put into his brother’s ear, giving the poison a rapid route to the throat.

Shakespeare would also have been aware of the accusations leveled at the famous French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (one of my heroes), who was accused of poisoning the French king, Francois II by giving him an ear infection.

 

Bottom picture: Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/var.0705/

Lub Dub

Posted

The invention of the stethoscope by R. T. Laennec in 1816 enabled a male doctor to listen to a female patient’s heart without needing to put his ear to her chest.

 

A Pie to Set Before a King

Posted

BookOfNurseryRhymes47I’ve blogged before about how the nursery rhyme about four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie was probably a coded song sung by Blackbeard the pirate’s men, recruiting new mates. But medieval and Renaissance-era recipes really did call for baking such things.

525px-SingSong6dcaldecottAccording to the book I’ve been reading, A History of Food in 100 Recipes (p 47), medieval recipes refer to pie pastry as a “coffin,” that is, a receptacle for whatever sweet or savory filling is baked inside. It cites this sixteenth century recipe from Italy that begins:

Make the coffin of a great pie or pastry, in the bottom make a hole as big as your fist. . .

And the title of the recipe?

To Make Pies That the Birds May be Alive in Them and Fly Out When It is Cut Up.

 

Illustrations from the novel A Book of Nursery Rhymes, 1901, via Wikimedia
Illustration from Sing a Song for Sixpence (1880) by Randolph Caldecott (d. 1886) via WIkimedia

Operation Baby

Posted

The first recorded Caesarean operation successfully performed on a living woman was in 1500 by a Swiss pig gelder named Jakob Nufer.

 

Timetables of History 271