The Curious Potions Of A Tudor First Aid Kit | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

there was this idea that something that looks like the thing you're trying to treat might actually help it and so there's a plant that's been called Pyle wort for example because it's roots look a bit like piles and this was used to treat hemorrhoids or piles because the plant looked a bit like what it was treating the idea of the home is something encompassed by four walls is a very modern notion so much of their domestic life involved the space outside as well as the rooms inside the Tudors instead the house was open and permeable humans and animals tumbled in and out and a colorful cacophonous myths from sunrise to sundown the famous Dutch humanist Erasmus visited Cambridge and he was disgusted by the state of the rushes these were the straw and the hay that they would they would put on the ground to keep the house warm to keep the house dry and he said that occasionally they would change the top layer but the bottom layer would sometimes stay there for 20 odd years and it was full of ale it was full of fish juice it was full of vomit it was for the leakage of men and of dogs and of other abominations not fit to mention you'd have somebody was called a gong farmer who would clean his Esprit a tree disease was obviously rife there was dysentery cholera typhoid three of the biggest ones in the Tudor period which would kill him no problems at all so if you went to work one day with a cut on your arm or your leg and the Gentry was going to the toilet and it covered you it was only a matter of time before one of those diseases King knocking on the door in these circumstances then it's easy to understand how something as basic and natural as childbirth was very dangerous around 20 out of every thousand women died in childbirth in comparison to eight maternal deaths per hundred thousand births in Britain today when women give birth obviously they're very vulnerable to infection the lining of the womb is a raw wound and there may be cuts and tears in the genital tract and all of those give an opportunity for infective organisms like bacteria to get into the bloodstream and that can be a very dangerous thing because people have no idea about how infections were caused the concept of microorganisms like viruses or bacteria causing disease that came hundreds of years later infection was a huge hidden killer in Tudor times as we can understand from the coroner's inquest reports that medical context explains why we have many of these accidental deaths because lots of these are people who cut themselves or break a limb they might cut themselves on a knife they might break a leg falling out of a tree in there in the the yard next to their house picking fruit or whatever and they wouldn't die from that now but under sixteenth-century circumstances they have infection in a wound or they have a blood clot which causes them problems from a broken leg and so actually the coroner's inquest reports report them dying five days 10 days 15 days after the accident but they still say that the accident was obviously the thing that caused it the coroner's reports tell us that between 1558 and 1560 unusual deaths from accidents around the country include death from crushed testicles after playing games at Christmas wrestling falling masonry 56 deaths were due to archery and one - an escaped bear but whatever the cause of injury or sickness get ill in the 15th or 16th century and you'd be unlikely to call in a professional doctor except an extremist most people of the middling sort would treat themselves at home using herbs and ingredients from recipes passed down through the generations for the Tudor housewife the medicine cabinet was limited to her knowledge and what was grown locally in the garden of a home of the middling sort there would be a special section laid out specifically for growing herps remedies for daily ailments in effect a Tudor first aid kit then a big Tudor house they would have their own physic garden and there's a vast early modern what's called a pharmacopoeia which is a body of her bonala jand an understanding of which plants can help you which plants can heal you and what conditions they can be used to treat now even the smallest cottage in the village the person living there will have that the same knowledge even if they don't have the physic garden but they'll know where to go in their local area to go and pick herbs Stewart peaches custodian have a small tutor staff physic garden what sort of plants do they think we're useful medicinally well we've got things like tansy here now Tan's is useful in springtime about the end of Lent because they thought that the intestinal worms they suffered from was partly result of all the fish that they'd eaten over that Lenten period and tansy is very good because it's a relatively mild poison that kills the worms next to that we've got Roo now Roo is one of a battery of different plants that can be used to induce abortion pennyroyal is another one long worked with it's what it leaves there that one is good for infections the lung easing the chest and would have been used as a general in that area so the tudor garden is really the ultimate in organic natural medicine absolutely it's free as well as far as they're concerned according to some sources 150 plants were considered to have useful medicinal qualities all grown in the garden and prepared in the home people have this vast storehouse of medical knowledge and remedies and they pass them around that may be to their families it might be to the friends and neighbors and of course when that happens the medicine spreads out into ever-growing circles it's also worth remembering that virtually our entire corpus of medical remedies tablets today are based on plants we are still using perhaps the same plants but we're distilling and we're using them in the different ways that the power is delight within the chemicals in the plants and that's what worked then and it works no but herbal cures weren't without their dangers get the dose wrong and you'd find yourself in trouble many of these plants are safe in small doses and toxic in high doses for example something like tansy which actually was very widely used as a way of purging worms from your body in the springtime later in the year that becomes toxic as the active ingredients build up in concentration and you can make yourself quite ill with it a mixed up with some effective practical cures were some very odd beliefs there was this idea that something that looks like the thing you're trying to treat might actually help it and so there's a plant that's been called pile wort for example because it's roots look a bit like piles and this was used to treat hemorrhoids or piles because the plant looked a bit like what it was treating these superstitious beliefs along with the unpredictability of some herbal cures men that Tudor medicine always had a potential to go disastrously wrong but a radical German invention seemed poised to change all of this for the better Johannes Gutenberg had invented his movable type printing press forty years before the Tudor era one of the things that is changing with medicine at this point is that with the introduction of printing which occurs just before the start of the Tudor period it is far easier to disseminate knowledge people have written books on medicine since classical times but what you're now seeing is the printed page making that more widely available initially printing presses were used mainly to produce religious texts but by the mid 16th century printers had found a new market publishing home manuals a mixture of remedies and recipes and these books are enormous John Jarrod's runs from out almost 1,700 pages profusely Illustrated and designed to enable you to clearly identify the plants and know what their effects are and what the toxicities are to some extent as well as what the benefits are bestsellers were reprinted over and over again to meet popular demand historians estimate that maybe 400,000 medical books were printed all together in the Tudor period suddenly those who could afford it had access to thousands of recipes in just one book far beyond their previous knowledge and all written by a supposed medical expert at first glance the books appear to contain no shortage of sound advice like John Jarrod's recommendation against planting deadly nightshade if you will follow my counsel deal not with the same in any case and banish it from your Gardens three boys did eat of the pleasant and beautiful fruit here of to where four died in less than eight hours after they had eaten them these medical books made their way into the Tudor home where they would have played a pivotal role in everyday life or death they're there to help people in the absence of a doctor that they're sort of called things like every man his own physician and they may be set out my body part so therefore you just simply leaf your way through and find something that's wrong with you but the medical tomes weren't necessarily the wonderful cure rules they first appeared to be some of the recipes found in their pages seem very odd today mrs. Andrew boards breath theory of health medical treatise that was something of a best-seller in the 16th century and it includes all sorts of Emma DS including this one here for the palsy so it says take a Fox with all the skin and all the body quartered and with the heart liver and lungs and the fatness of the entrails stones and kidneys Steve is it long in running water with Calla mint bomb and Caraway's and bathed the patient in the water of it and the smell of a fox is good for the palsy to the tudors cures like this were rooted in perfectly reasonable ideas about the body and disease a living thing something that has been alive has and what's called an animus a living spirit and so if part of you is withered dying then it makes a perfect logical sense to use something from something that's been a life and restore the spirit to yourself cures incorporation the blood and bacteria-ridden guts of an animal stood a high chance of being fatal if applied to an open wound like this remedy for a sexually transmitted disease Nicholas Culpeper 1618 herbal has a remedy for the clap which is to kill a chicken and while it's still warm to dip your privy parts in it to soothe and calm but there was a basic problem with all the cures they were all based on a fundamental misunderstanding the trouble with all the recipes and cures in the home manuals is that their pre-scientific the tutors simply didn't know about the bacterial pathogens that cause infection and disease their theory of the body was of the four humors four key fluids that needed to be kept in balance to remain healthy disease was simply thought to be a result of an imbalance of the humours nowadays we know there's no scientific basis for that at all but if you've got a theory of disease that's simply wrong how can you cure it unfortunately for the Tudors they believed they were following sound medical advice these are scientific men leaders of the medical world writing these tanks and the dangerous then they become effectively gospel the knowledge in the books would have been perceived as being at the cutting edge of medicine and the recipes endured for so long because really effective treatments from infectious disease were still hundreds of years away [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, anne boleyn, henry viii, the tudors, hampton court, documentary history, absolute history, full length documentaries, history documentary

Id: Jiu7O3THRI0

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019