How Disease Plagued Daily Victorian Life | Medieval Dead | Absolute History

York second city of England in medieval times daily life is hard enough without the ever-present shadow that stalks all members of society from Kings to beggars centuries before the discovery of penicillin people go about their lives knowing it's only church or meager charity will be their help if they fall prey to the spectre of disease [Music] for more than 700 years a woman lay buried below the old stone streets of York there was no record of who she was nor of the awful conditions you had to endure without hope of a cure death is going to be with you see now new research is unlocking the story of her life by uncovering the evidence contained in that box the medieval world the fifth to the 15th century a team of archaeologists investigates medieval life by exploring the world of the medieval dead we don't hear the stories about the common good fun focusing on the manual left you're looking for you could almost look through their eyes that what did they say how did they die I forbid you ever to enter a church a monastery affair a mill a market or an assembly of people I forbid you to leave your house unless dressed in your recognizable garb and also shod I forbid you to share house with any woman but your wife I command you if accosted by anyone while traveling on a road to set yourself downwind of them before you answer I forbid you to enter any narrow passage lest a passerby bump into you I forbid you wherever you go to touch the rim or the rope of a well without donning your gloves I forbid you to touch any child or give them anything I forbid you to drink or eat from any vessel but you're not the words of the mass of separation thought by some to have been spoken by medieval churchmen to sufferers of leprosy in the middle of the Middle Ages around the 10th to 11th century medieval world right as the Dark Ages have gradually left behind the rate of change within across Europe and the Near East societies experienced huge change birth rates increase and populations grow migration between countries increases and within countries migration from the land to urban areas towns and cities grow to accommodate vast new populations and more people brings more problems such as overcrowding poverty war as if the everyday folk of the medieval world didn't have enough hazards to contemplate it's a time of expansion - for mankind's greatest enemy disease it's an age still several centuries before the discovery of bacteria and penicillin in cramped towns and remote rural areas alike sanitation and hygiene were misunderstood or completely absent the 15th century Dutch cleric Erasmus knew how filthy were the houses of most people floors are laid with white clay and are covered with rushes occasionally renewed but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed sometimes for 20 years harboring expectoration vomiting the leakage of dogs and men bale droppings scraps of fish and other abominations not fit to be mentioned conditions were perfect for bacteria and the spread of infection disease had no equal in the misery it could inflict there were no defenses against it no inoculations no cures by our standards today it's inconceivable the people of medieval England endured such living conditions did they have a really Pleasant life live a life of luxury eat the right foods have a really pleasant you know rich lifestyle or did they suffer some of the most horrendous diseases known to man leprosy syphilis things that really affected them and even took their the evidence with them to the grave and so looking at the skeleton you can see them and say that was not a nice way to live or to die archeologists now recognize that much can be learned from the study of disease its effects are locked away in the archaeological record and the skeletal remains of the population of the Middle Ages the medieval dead Charlotte Roberts has spent her career studying archaeological human remains through the lens of biological research she's a bio archaeologist I think the term bio archaeologists smells the two disciplines of biology so looking at the biological evidence for disease with the archaeological context I need to understand the archaeology of the site from which these skeletons come from to be able to interpret the evidence for disease that I see in the skeletons Charlotte is an expert in paleo pathology the study of diseases within the archaeological record tracing their history and development it's a relatively new discipline having grown primarily over the past 50 years but now recently it's been helped by developments in new methods such as DNA analysis of the pathogens that cause infectious disease it's a branch of archaeology which has the potential to influence current or future healthcare can we as paleo pathologists actually study those diseases and help explain inform what we see today and perhaps predict the future we know even just from historical documents in the past that a lot of infectious diseases were pretty rife in the medieval period and a lot of that was to do with the type of living conditions people had the types of diet they were eating or what diets they weren't eating so these these people are from late medieval York buried at a site called Fisher gate house and a lot of them were non ad we call non adults so they're not at the University of Durham students learn how to spot evidence of disease it's part of the skill of a bio archaeologist detecting the traces of infection on skeletal remains to be able to teach and research in peri pathology and you need to have skeletal remains or mummified remains to to work with in the medieval period the center beer a huge range of infectious diseases many of which that we wouldn't actually be able to see on the skeleton because the only effect soft tissues but the key ones for me would be cheaper Colossus and leprosy both caused by bacteria as is something called trap animal disease so there's three what I would call specific infections were ones that caught could cause damage to the skeleton and were pretty frequent in the medieval period one of the most prevalence of these medieval diseases was syphilis still known today as a venereal condition archaeologists and paleontologists Don brothel has studied ancient diseases in human and animal remains for almost half a century first of all you've got to realize that there are three clinical diseases and venereal syphilis is just one of them and that probably if you're thinking in terms of an evolutionary tree of diseases that is close to the other two but in fact that probably is the last evolving the neurosyphilis from this other group called the trepan Eames or Treponema ptosis the whole group is called and the other two are endemic syphilis and yours endemic syphilis you pick it up usually during the first ten years of your life it's linked with poor hygiene sharing food vessels and that sort of thing so it's within family groups so you're all together eating sharing food utensils and so on so this is where it all begins so it's easily caught during childhood and then it gradually progresses through into the adult period now endemic syphilis was probably affected a lot of the populations during medieval times in the Near East now our connection there of course was with the Crusades for instance so we're likely to have probably picked up endemic syphilis and brought it through into northern Europe I think at that stage probably well-defined venereal so for this section Lee transmitted syphilis probably wasn't around or was extremely uncommon through his work in paleo pathology Don believes that syphilis underwent a fundamental change identified through remains in the archaeological record the transformation happened within the medieval period at the height of the great population changes then occurring but what I think was happening during the medieval period was that in fact the disease endemic syphilis was becoming transformed and it is becoming transformed because it had to move through into northern Europe into different societies in colder climates and so on so the medieval world was very interesting from this point of view for the evolution of venereal syphilis I think this is really quite an interesting phenomenon that was going on during the medieval period we know diseases have changed they changed their face through the years modifying themselves and so on I mean Darwin would have been an excited virus and he didn't know about it so we don't know how many times it's changed this is something which we still really have to study we can study the evolution of man but in relation to that there's also the evolution of the diseases which were following him through time as he were the work of paleo pathologists is being aided as more skeletal remains become available for study less stigma is attached now than in previous eras to excavate in Christian burials from the medieval period and even later now in terms of numbers of bones or skeletons let's just take England or Britain now we're excavating more Christian burial grounds and that's why they're beginning to turn up in more numbers so we we have now quite a few cemeteries one of the most notorious diseases of the medieval period still carries with it today the stigma of uncleanliness decay it was a terrible condition to endure in medieval times though it was and still is one made worse for sufferers by the plethora of myths superstitions and inaccuracies which surround it the Bible did nothing to alleviate this one myth about leprosy is that it's described in the Bible and unfortunately that myth has led to the continued stigmatization of people with leprosy today but it it is believed now that that the word in the Bible that people have used as indicating leprosy was a mistranslation of a hebrew word which basically means skin diseases impurity but not leprosy specifically misrepresentations like this democracy is still generally regarded as being incurable another myth is that leprosy is incurable but it is curable with antibiotics and in fact the treatments been free since 1995 so if people gain access to the treatment and they can be cured so leprosy is curable but people call it the living death by modern standards it's a serious a curable infection laughs this is the bacterial infection so caused by bacteria the bacteria ends up in the lungs usually from someone with leprosy coughing and sneezing over someone else and then they inhale the droplets containing the bacteria so establishes itself in the lungs and then potentially it will spread to other parts of the body the bacteria affects the bones of the face mainly the architecture of the nasal area it can also affect the nervous system the sensory nerves motor nerves and the autonomic nervous system sufferers lose their sense of feeling leading to damage to the fingers and toes going unnoticed and becoming ulcerated and which can then spread to the bones [Music] another crude myth dogs leprosy sufferers that they lose fingers and toes again it's a misrepresentation of the diseases symptoms when the infection affecting the hands and feet the hand and foot bones gets established the fingers and toes are affected and they tend to absorb so the ends of the fingers and toes absorb and the fingers and toes get shorter and shorter and shorter but the skin contracts around what's left of the fingers and toes and the actual nails the fingernails and toenails are actually retained so so they don't drop off the toes and fingers just get shorter so to be able to recognize leprosy in skeletons we're looking for those facial changes and we're looking for changes in the hands and the feet probably the greatest myths surrounding leprosy is that it causes fatality in fact it weakens the immune system meaning death can occur from whatever other infections the individual is also exposed to such as tuberculosis leprosy sufferers were just as likely to die from everyday conditions such as heart attack or stroke though they might have lived with the disease for decades before hand please call the living death because you don't die from it and you can live for many years with it but you can get complications that will eventually kill you like kidney problems but I think the living death phrase attached to leprosy perhaps come through history and I'm not entirely certain that that would have been the case for everyone in the medieval period feeling that it was the living death is it possible that medieval people had a more pragmatic accepting view of leprosy and up to now we've given them credit for our perceptions today of leprosy are influenced by 19th century attitude when sufferers were banished to remote places like condemned criminals known as leper colonies so when when we come to the 19th century and the treatment of people with leprosy then we see a lot of islands being used for segregation of people with leprosy Robben Island off the south coast of South Africa was where people were sent with leprosy spin alonga the island off the side of Crete in Greece and Molokai in Hawaii documentary sources suggest their existence wasn't very pleasant so you can imagine sort of existence these people were having that time the 19th century was the time of mass transportation of criminals as well as the sufferers of infectious disease in the medieval period this practice was still hundreds of years in the future they had to deal with the problem of leprosy in society in different ways medical knowledge of disease were still in the realm of alchemy and superstition if you went to a doctor in medieval period they would have described the cause of illness as being due to an imbalance of your humors at that time the idea of health was based upon the four humors of blood phlegm black bile and yellow bile being in balance and if they were out of balance so if they were corrupted then that led illness [Music] he is Mitchell is a consultant doctor and bio archaeologist he studied the principles on which medieval medicine was taught and administered now among the higher clergy we have this concept that sin may be a cause of illness in the 13th century for example the fourth Lateran council specifically states that before a doctor should treat a sick patient they should have abolition of their sins because certain diseases will not get better regardless of how good a doctor is unless God forgives the sins that caused it most people who fell ill in the medieval period will just be looked after by their family until they got better or died those who were wealthy who could afford a physician or in fact the nobles who would have employed a physician to look after them full time as such these people would have had medical intervention and treatment and of course the physician would assess their humoral balance by looking at their urine checking their pulse and all the other ways they would interpret human balance around the eleventh century as the problem of leprosy grew in European cities special hospitals began to appear in the medieval period we start to see the setting up of hospitals known as leprous area which was specifically for people they felt had leprosy people with leprosy generally wanted to be in these leprous area they were felt to be a good place to be they were looked after they were fed and watered they had a chaplain and they could say prayers and prepare themselves for the next life and they often saw having leprosy as a way of making penance for their sins so that they already had been cleansed of their sins so that they were in a better position to get into heaven leprous area were places where by relative standards a genuine humanist approach was adopted rather than being placed as to hide away unsightly or undesirable elements of society historians are now saying from documentary data that there were actually fairly pleasant places to be because at least she got fed and you got a roof over your head somewhere to sleep and it was probably better than living in a gutter with no food and no shelter they are often independent institutions set up by a rich nobleman or a businessman who would want to have a philanthropic way of spending their money so everyone in town thought they weren't really nice but also it was a way of getting prayers said for their soul so that when they died if they were not able to go straight to heaven there were people praying for them so that they would then be able to proceed to go into heaven to make up for the sins that they may have made during their life and so we find from the 11th century onwards a rapid rise in the foundation not only of leprous area for people with leprosy but also of general hospitals and arms houses and any way that you were providing care for the poor or the needy where they would say prayers for your soul medieval leprosy hospitals would to the later 19th century colonies there were not places for people cast out from society in forbidden remote places there were more a part of society and they're citing with leprous area we're often in the midst of the new busy towns and cities people talk about the sighting of leprosy hospitals outside city walls but if you think about it it was quite a logical place to put them because they were often on roadsides at crossroads by bridges and it was a good place to get charity you know to get people to give them money to get them to give them food skeletal remains showing signs of leprosy are rare the effects of the disease only manifest in the bones in a very small number of cases due to the way the disease affects particular parts of the skeleton such as the bones of the face they often don't survive well in the round in 2007 a skeleton was found following development work in Dixon Lane York in the warm gate area within the medieval walls the York archaeological trust excavated the site believed to be the cemetery associated with the lost Church of st. Stephen's osteo archaeologist Mullen Holst was asked to carry out a full analysis of the skeleton and to confirm that the individual had suffered from leprosy this M skeleton here is from the medieval period probably the high medieval period so the 12 to 15 century and she was found together with hundred 16 other skeletons in the center of York not too far from Clifford's Tower and it's a female skeleton you can tell by this area here of the pelvis which is very wide and she was quite old well forma de veau standards she was at least 46 years old but probably older but unfortunately because the aging of the skeleton relies on the deterioration of the joints we can age skeletons beyond the age of 46 so she could have been 93 years old or 47 so we can't we can't tell so the interesting thing with this go we've got some new genes that are associated with leprosy so the area here of the nose is more eroded or is eroded which normally wouldn't be the case and that's typical of the so-called minor maxillary syndrome in skeletons of individuals with leprosy she also has lesions in the fingers that could be associated with leprosy you can see here is the first digit of the finger this part here and this bit is the middle digit here so it's this digit there and you can see that this is normal in shape but this part here is actually tapered at the distal end and that's probably the result of leprosy and it's the same in all of the central digits or parts of the digits in both hands I think from looking at the skeleton you can certainly say that she was cared for because she lived a good age she probably had the leprosy of infection for some time anomaly leprosy infected in a costume childhood or young adulthood so the fact that she's at least 46 years old means that she's lived for some time with this infection now what was interesting as well as that she's got very thick dental plaque on some of the teeth you can get an awful lot of information from this material because basically everything that goes into your mouth can be trapped in this material this is rock-hard this is very tough stuff so it can literally trap anything they can be evidence for smoking or for what purple adds for example raspberries and so on and they can also be flour weevils so all sorts of things can be trapped in these things and now we have the technology to analyze it so this is very interesting stuff and the thicker the better also the person's DNA that can be trapped there research is now being done to broaden the understanding of leprosy and other infectious diseases in archaeology up to now it's not always been possible to say for certain that an individual had leprosy only if they had had it long enough for it to make recognizable changes on the surface of bones yet now with new DNA techniques is becoming possible to a lot information preserved within skeletal remains at the University of York's department of bio archaeology Sarah filament and Camilla speller are developing new techniques to do this one involves sampling organic material from within one of the best-preserved parts of the skeleton the teeth in particular they're interested in the dental calculus or plaque that builds up through daily life if it isn't brushed away the calculus forms deposits as hard as enamel itself which can last for thousands of years and it does have nice like deposits of the oh wow no that is a lot I think so yeah we think so I think if we start with these so yeah much we collect yeah there's at least five with considerable amounts mm-hmm how clear this is basically the best reservoir we have of the bacterial history of that person so we have remains of any of the possible diseases caused by bacteria the remains are basically mineralized and preserved perfectly so we're managing to get really good information both from DNA and proteins so it's an invaluable source really it starts off as a biofilm on the teeth so a thin layer covering enamel and as the bacteria grows and as time goes on that what was a film will become mineralized and that basically is what preserves all the bacteria in a perfect state and layers just consecutively grow on top if you don't clean your teeth then it just accumulates layer after layer and these have particularly seems a shame that the dentist comes along now and scrapes off all our calculus you know we pay them so much to remove it we hope to do two different analyses on it or three we'd like to look at the protein components so looking both at the human proteins but also at the bacterial proteins we're going to do DNA analysis on it and and amplify the bacterial DNA of all the different bacterial species that are in there and hopefully we'll be catching the micro bacterium that causes leprosy so micro bacterium leprae and so we're looking specifically at this skeleton to see if we can reconstruct the ancient genome of micro bacterium leprae so we can see what leprosy the genetic makeup of leprosy in the past and compare it to today yeah we're just only discovering really what a rich reservoir calculus is for these bacteria and so this is one of the first applications is to look beyond oral bacteria and now look at other maybe systemic diseases once you combine that you know with their archaeological context and also with other information that you can get from the skeleton you can sort of piece together quite a full picture of somebody's life Sarah and Camilla's research is ongoing and just one means by which the long-term history of diseases can be explored and tracked through time the same way human and other behaviors are contained within the archaeological record Pia's Mitchell too has studied the archaeological evidence for infectious disease in particular through his work in the Middle East relating to the Crusades he studied how one of the military orders of knights was dedicated to helping with the problem of leprosy in the disease ridden Crusader States the order of sin Lazarus was a Latin european-style monastic order that was actually set up in the early 12th century in the Middle East as a result of the Crusades it started off as a medical order where people with leprosy would be looked after by healthy people who are often pilgrims who came out to the east and decided to settle by the eleven 40s the order of sant lazarus expanded so it didn't just have this lepers area of outside jerusalem it set up one in acre and it set up a number of other leprous area in caesarea and so on other places in the kingdom of jerusalem and the other Frankish states we find them expanding so that the leprous area that has been built in as independent institutions in europe were then donated by people who couldn't really afford to run them anymore and given to the order of sand Lazarus so it was then their job to look after them what we find is over time when Knight and Crusaders either develop leprosy or develop leprosy in Europe but wanted to spend the rest of their life doing something what they felt was really important they could join the order of sin Lazarus so that we find that by the 13th century the order said Lazarus has a significant military component where they fight with the army of the king of Jerusalem and the Knights of the order of Lazarus would fight in their own component as part of the king's army but they do tend to have had a reputation of rarely coming back so while it may be that they deliberately wanted to fight to the death because they felt if you're going to die fighting the enemies of Christendom then that may well have meant that you would then go straight to heaven from they're their views on what happened after death but a number of battles in the 12 40s and 12 50s we find that either all the members of the older son Lazarus that took part died or only a few returned to life within decades the orders influence extended from the Holy Land in the east to England in England there were about perhaps 320 Lacrosse area built altogether during the medieval period and only eight of them were part of the orders and Lazarus so you can see how the majority of leprous area were still independent institutions paid for and run by towns or by the nobility so far as is known the Order of Saint Lazarus operated no hospitals in the City of York yet Charlotte Roberts believes the woman from Dixon Lane could still have received treatment in the city she's come to the University of York's Department of archaeology at King's Manor her aim is to find out what she can about medieval York's leprosy hospitals and whether there's a link between any of them and the Dixon Lane burial site Malin Holst knows the city's archaeological sites she's carried out osteological analysis on many of the skeletons from them I did a little bit of research trying to find out how many leprous area there were in York yeah in the medieval period there was quite an early one in the 12th century some Nicholas right yeah I think you've found that one yes that was excavated by the York College good trust the records that remain seem to indicate that the city's leprous area were places where people in need who did not necessarily have leprosy could also receive shelter I noticed in the documentary evidence for this hospital that both people with leprosy and also the poor were admitted to this hospital right yeah sarang's so it's a big mix oh the Dixon Lane skeleton was part of the sin Stevens and cemetery skeletal assemblage which was excavated here in this area which was right next to the EM Kings fish pool here and I think that was excavated together with hundred thirteen other skeletons again none of which had leprosy so it's like common then that they well marginal position well well it's been suggested that they had a marginal position but my research also suggests that generally skeletons with leprosy from archaeological sites and this is all over the world that I've located are not usually nothing leprous area and if they are in just normal parish cemeteries they're not marginalised there within well with everyone else yes they're not made special she was just amongst it right amongst if the skeleton was buried in a marginal position this could indicate an association with leprosy that the burial was deliberately placed away from other graves the next step is to try and locate the church where the Dixon Lane woman might have been a parishioner but the area has changed dramatically with modern development looking at the medieval layout of that area might offer up clues Helen good child helps Charlotte try to zero in on the archaeology around Dixon Lane where the lost church of st. Stephen's is thought to have once stood I mean is there any evidence on on early Maps perhaps of this stephen's church so in what period are we talking we're talking about thirteen twelve thirteen fourteen century let's say well the earliest map that we do have for York or that actually shows any kind of real detail for that for the city itself is the John speed map which is actually much later but it's about 1610 so this is just the modern Ordnance Survey map so it's correct geographic coordinates if I turn that on here and switch on the Ordnance Survey map so Clifford's Tower is here then we cut the whole castle precinct is here and so just to the east of that is what is probably the area of Dixon now the map doesn't show a connection with since Stevens but there are several other churches within a very close area several of which have connections with leprosy it's at Mary's aunt Margaret's st. Denis and sent George's all were very very near to each other there's a number of saints actually associated with leprosy and the foundation of leprous area George is one of them but also Giles Mary Magdalene was probably a dozen saints associate of his leprosy you know it is interesting that some George's Church she's actually located very close to where we think since Stevens was and where this lady with leprosy was buried but what that tells us disease was almost impossible to avoid for everyday people in the Middle Ages so much so that this influenced attitudes towards life and death now infectious diseases in the medieval period were clearly feared we hear of people that ran away from epidemics so we know that they wanted to live they didn't all want to die but we do also know that attitude to disease in the medieval period were fairly tolerant of death they understood that death happened they didn't all expect to live to a ripe old age until relatively recent times the last hundred or two years you your life expectancy was low so around earlier populations medieval and prehistoric and so on they were seeing people dead and gone their parents you know by 30 40 years of age and and that we can't understand nowadays we can't really get a feel for that that that life was short for them or they didn't see many old folk around old in the sense of you know 1890 a hundred years of age a feuds you know didn't make it but very few I think we don't realize how much people of those days were you know I accepted life was short and tough if you got a serious condition you accepted death was going to be with you soon the church encouraged a fatalistic yet essentially positive view as to how to live life knowing that death the teachings from the church told them that if they did die so long as they had confessed their sins and lived a good life it didn't matter that they were going to die because they were going to go to heaven and in that context the fear of death was something that we would expect would be very different in the medieval period a much less of a problem though we might expect to find in modern people who may not follow a particular religion and who often fear death as a result because they think the end of their life is the end of everything for them on the streets of York Charlotte finds the spot in Dixon Lane where the woman lay buried for more than 700 years all right so this is Dixon Lane where the Stevens church was and where the cemetery was excavated obviously none runs of these new buildings here and it's where the lady with leprosy was found whether there was actually any hospital nearby where this person had access to treatment it is another matter but she was buried in the normal parish cemetery but she had bone changes of life to see whether the she'd actually been diagnosed with leprosy is another matter but it suggests I would suggest that she was probably accepted in the community as part of that community and was buried in their community churchyard perhaps she was a valued member of the community even though she may have been recognized having this this infectious disease it will never be known if the woman buried at Dixon Lane receives special care for her leprosy yet where she lay was in consecrated ground in the heart of a city parish within a short walk of a church whose patron saint was connected with sufferers from terrible disease hers was no exiled burial she lay at the heart of a community that seems likely to have regarded her plight at the very least with compassion she suffered from one of the worst diseases in human history and yet she wasn't sent away to die in a closed colony she was buried in the heart of the society in which she lived and of which she was apart at some degree they are still here because we still have access to them sometimes when they develop a cemetery and they have to clear it that people have to come up and was as distasteful as some people might find it sometimes it's a necessity sometimes these are these people are found by accidents their skeletons and we have to do them a service by allowing them to tell us their story and so finding the evidence of these people brings it all back to life it brings the evidence back straight towards us and it becomes unavoidable so therefore we've got the building's we've got that people we've got everything and this is the medieval world and it's a privilege to be able to study it [Music] you

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Id: WCApDCdIRdY

Length: 46min 10sec (2770 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019