During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fashionable women wouldn’t consider travelling without a black velvet mask, called a vizard, to protect their complexion from the sun, from the dust kicked up by horses, and from gritty, polluted city air. Such a precaution may strike us as ironic, considering that many women were slathering their faces thickly with poisonous lead-filled makeup. (I’ve blogged about this before.) Poorer women might simply tie a cloth around their mouths and noses to keep out the worst of the dust.
Hardly any of these masks have survived, but the one in this picture was found during the renovation of a 16th-century stone building, inside a four-foot thick wall. It’s in the British Museum.
A lady kept her mask in place by a thick glass bead, which she would have held in her mouth.
According to this article, Queen Elizabeth’s masks were lined with perfumed leather.
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images:
A horseman with his wife in the saddle behind him, Habits de France, 1581
Cassidy,J (2010) NARC-151A67 A POST MEDIEVAL MASK Webpage available at: http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/402520
In 1853, Dr. John Snow administered recently-discovered chloroform to Queen Victoria for the birth of her eighth child. From that point on, the use of anesthetics for pain relief in childbirth became widely accepted.
Ever wonder why the color purple has long been known as the color reserved for royalty?
A sort-of purple cloak, favored by high-ranking ancient Romans,from "Costumes of All Nations," 1881 (via Wikimedia)
I’ve blogged before–actually a few times–about what a dismal job it was to be a textile dyer, over the course of centuries. Before the discovery of synthetic dyes in the mid-1800s, dying fabric was extremely complicated, dangerous, and smelly work. Dyers worked with corrosive acids, poisonous salts, and steaming vats of nasty-smelling muck.
Nowadays practically all fabric dye is produced synthetically in a laboratory, but prior to 1850 or so, colors could only be created with stuff found in nature. And for centuries, purple was the most rare and costly color of all.
Tyrian purple, as it came to be known, was produced by Phoenician people in the city of Tyre. They were known to the Greeks as Phoinikes, or the “Purple Men.” The Phoenicians lived in a coastal area east of Egypt on a strip of land in what is now Lebanon, from about 900 BC until 600 BC. Although the Minoans were probably the first to make purple, back in 2500 BC, it was the Phoenicians who produced enough of the stuff to trade and grow prosperous.
Tyrian purple was sought after by Roman Emperors and imperial monarchs throughout Asia. And it came from a rather unlikely source: snail snot.
Muricids are gastropods whose hypobranchial gland secretes a mucusey substance that turns different colors when exposed to sunlight. Tyrian purple was produced from a mollusk known as Murex brandaris.
The Phoenicians established beachside dye centers wherever they found significant populations of these shells.
Each Murex brandaris produces just two drops of a milky-looking secretion. Dyers had to crush thousands of shells to produce enough dye for just one toga. After being smooshed, the mollusks were left in the sun to rot. The oozy slime they secreted was painstakingly collected. By carefully timing its exposure to sunlight, dyers created colors from green to violet to red, to the most prized, an almost-black purple. The smell from the rotting mollusks was so atrocious that no one could bear to live nearby.
Eventually, Tyrian purple was replaced by a new purple dye that was much less costly to produce. The new dye was made from a species of lichen. But the term royal purple remains part of our language to this day. It’s even in the Crayola crayon box.
In 1675, King Charles II of England banned coffee houses on the grounds (cough) that they had become “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons.” The ban was ignored.
Natural antiseptics were widely recognized in the ancient world. Egyptians used honey and myrrh to promote healing. Greeks used urine, wine, or vinegar on open wounds.
by John Greenwood, Original Yale College building, 1718-1782
My oldest son will be attending college next fall, and he’s now in the fun-but-fraught phase of trying to decide where he’s going, so college is kind of on my mind.
Recently I came across a passage in a book called Man and Microbes, written by Arno Karlen, that caught my eye. While researching epidemic diseases, I read in several sources that many of the earliest American colleges were established out of fear of smallpox, and Karlen confirms that. According to Karlen, “. . . well-off young Americans who went to Oxford or Cambridge for education risked disfigurement or death from smallpox. In fact, fear of smallpox was a major spur to the creation of American universities.”
Which makes sense, if you think about it. During the early 1700s, 400,000 Europeans died every year from smallpox. Jenner’s first vaccinations didn’t occur until 1796.
And most people in the colonies still lived on farms and in small villages. So few American cities were large enough to be ravaged by the “crowd diseases” that had been afflicting Europeans for centuries. Young men who’d grown up in the New World, without infantile exposure to these diseases, ran a real risk of dying if they went off across the ocean to Oxford and Cambridge. Harvard was established the earliest (1636) followed by a bunch more in the early to mid 1700s—William and Mary 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, Columbia 1754, followed soon thereafter by U Penn, Brown, Rutgers and Dartmouth.
OCD composer Ludwig van Beethoven brewed every cup of coffee with exactly sixty beans. The French novelist Honore de Balzac drank as many as fifty cups of thick black coffee per day. President Theodore Roosevelt drank approximately a gallon of coffee per day.
The British and the French haven’t seen eye to eye for a long time. Since the Battle of Hastings, actually. (That was in 1066.)
In 1805, a sea battle was fought off the coast of Spain between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navy, during the Napoleonic Wars (1803 – 1815). It’s known as the Battle of Trafalgar. The British won the battle.
The Royal Navy was led by Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was kind of a rock star in Britain at the time.
Admiral Nelson By Leonardo Guzzardi (1799)
Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle. Because the British wanted to give him a state funeral, they decided the best way to preserve his body for the long journey back to England was by submerging it in a barrel of brandy.
It worked pretty well. His body was transported back to England, and today is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Statues of Nelson are all over the place in England—such as this modest little tribute in Trafalgar Square.
Pigeons will appreciate that the statue depicts Nelson missing his right arm (he lost an arm and an eye in a previous sea battle). photo by David Castor
All this is fairly well-known. But there’s been a story circulating for a long time that because their brandy rations were abruptly halted, sailors aboard the Victory siphoned off the brandy from the barrel in which their dead admiral was submerged and—blech—drank it. According to the myth-debunking website snopes.com, this story is unsubstantiated–although if you read it carefully, they don’t actually come out and say it isn’t true.
The British Navy began using the term “tapping the Admiral” to describe someone taking a drink on the sly.
Construction of the Great Wall of China began in the seventh century BC and continued for centuries. As many as a million workers died building it, mostly from starvation or exposure.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fashionable women wouldn’t consider travelling without a black velvet mask, called a vizard, to protect their complexion from the sun, from the dust kicked up by horses, and from gritty, polluted city air. Such a precaution may strike us as ironic, considering that many women were slathering their faces thickly with poisonous lead-filled makeup. (I’ve blogged about this before.) Poorer women might simply tie a cloth around their mouths and noses to keep out the worst of the dust.
A lady kept her mask in place by a thick glass bead, which she would have held in her mouth.
