Poul Anderson has a somewhat relevant essay on Heroic Fantasy: https://www.writingforums.org/resources/on-thud-and-blunder.378/
This might interest people who want a glimpse into old battles. We have the modern more peaceful variant of medieval battles called Battle of the Nations:
Regarding people being afraid of "water-borne diseases": The germ theory of disease wasn't an accepted model until the late 1800's. Dr. John Snow didn't prove that cholera came from tainted water sources until 1854. There was literally no concept of water-borne disease, or airborne disease, or anything like that. The most commonly believed disease theory up until 1865ish (when Pasteur did his famous experiments) was the "miasma" theory; that is to say, disease came from evil vapors and bad smells. Which I guess wasn't a terribly bad call, given what they had to work with.
And one weird medical outgrowth of the miasma theory is that some medical practitioners began to wash their hands with alcohol-based perfumes to get rid of the stench of illness and death, which actually kinda worked.
Didn't people use the waterways as a disposal for everything - urine, fecal matter, garbage, etc, etc? Wouldn't it be logical to assume that drinking that stuff might possibly contribute to illness? Yah, sure, you can go "upstream" but "upstream" is relative.
They also sometimes incorporated it in the mud they used to build their homes with. Talk about living in a shit-hole.
I was going to look this one up but fortunately it was addressed before I had to. I did find this interesting video testing the concept with various weapons and armor. There are a number of other demonstration videos, quite intertesing. This one I didn't even need to look up. Someone addressed it as well. It's interesting that people forget how recently the germ theory was discovered. Dr Snow's cholera discovery was mentioned. Despite the fact he spelled out with incredibly thorough evidence how he determined the Broad St water source was contaminated with cholera, and he even found the source, sewage in a basement that leaked into the ground water, Snow's colleagues took ten years to accept Snow's conclusion. In the meantime, London officials, based on Snow's work, took the Broad St pump handle off, thus ending the epidemic. I just love that story. Only when water sources were poisonous like with arsenic. ... A full moon is bright enough to cast shadows. In Colorado we used to go cross-country skiing at night by the full Moon. I'd love to see a reference for this if you have one. I have an interest in the history of hand washing in medicine. Not if you have no concept of germs. Even today people in third world countries continue to contaminate their own drinking water sources.
Can't leave out the myth that women never fought: “We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative” by Kameron Hurley It's a wonderful piece about mistaken beliefs and how easily we adopt them.
@GingerCoffee - there is a discussion of sterilization of instruments and I *think* handwashing in one of the freak economics books, probably the first one. I only vaguely recall it but the situation was that one doctor had a greater success rate than others because of his sterilization techniques for his instruments and hands. Unfortunately for the advance of medicine, he kept it a trade secret.
That's interesting. I'll look for it. In a related story: NPR The midwives practiced hand washing and the med students came straight from autopsies without washing their hands. My apologies, not trying to hijack the thread.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives You're welcome
Interesting, that matches up on the "smell" front to what I remember. Perhaps I got things crossed up or perhaps whatever my original source was did. Thanks for finding that.
Ok, the story that Iain mentioned about the investigator tracing the source of the illness in the new mothers coming from doctors and med students coming to child birth facilities after conducting autopsies...that story is in "Super-Freakononmics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, 2009. The section I remembered about someone having a medical advance and keeping it to himself is also in this book but it is the invention of the forceps. This is a device that a doctor can use to turn a child in the birth canal who is about to come out feet first or derriere first so that it does not become stuck in the uterus, endangering both mother and child. Quoted from page 141 of the hard cover: "As effective as it was, the forceps did not save as many lives as it should have. It is thought to have been invented in the early seventeenth century by a London obstetrician named Peter Chamberlen. The forceps worked so well that Chamberlen kept it a secret, sharing it only with sons and grandsons who continued in the family business. It wasn't until the mid eighteenth century that the forceps passed into general use. What was the cost of this technological hoarding? According to the surgeon and author Atul Gawande, 'it had to have been millions of lives lost.'" Weird....not how I recalled it but close enough that I suspect my memory saw this topic and "filled in the blanks."
Peasants didn't always eat gruel. Granted, geography, war, and whether there was a famine going on were contributing factors, but peasant families across medieval Europe actually ate reasonably well much of the time. Here's a fascinating Youtube video in which a food historian cooks up a meal that wouldn't look out of place in a gastro-pub in rural England.
Mixing memories together is common. I'm glad the issue was resolved though, before I spent a couple weeks researching that particular hand washing history.
An interesting little tidbit of knowledge just came to me via a book I was reading and some online research. Although nobody knows exactly when or where it was invented (apparently in the Middle East, possibly Egypt) the art of knitting didn't reach Europe till late in the Middle Ages ...14th or 15th century! So before that, nobody would have been wearing knitted socks, sweaters, hats, mittens, etc. And apparently 'socks' were the go-to item. (You can see why ...a pair of knitted socks would be a lot more comfortable to wear than socks cobbled together with sewn fabrics.) Interesting. I always assumed knitted items went back a lot farther than that. Interesting as well. Apparently the knitters of that late-medieval era were always men. They formed guilds, etc. Knitting didn't become an acceptable woman's activity till much later on.
The left and right shoe weren't invented until the 19th century. Until then, shoes were interchangeable.
