Gong farmer (also gongfermor, gongfermour, gong-fayer, gong-fower or gong scourer) was a term that entered use in Tudor England to describe someone who dug out and removed human excrement from privies and cesspits. The word "gong" was used for both a privy and its contents. As the work was considered unclean and off-putting to the public, gong farmers were only allowed to work at night, hence they were sometimes known as nightmen. The waste they collected, known as night soil, had to be taken outside the city or town boundary or to official dumps for disposal.
Fewer and fewer cesspits needed to be dug out as more modern sewage disposal systems, such as pail closets and water closets, became increasingly widespread in 19th-century England. The job of emptying cesspits today is usually carried out mechanically using suction, by specialised tankers called vacuum trucks.
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Human waste "was used to manure the land or enrich the soil. The townsfolk of Newcastle-on-Tyne piled their ashes and dung [humanure] on a heap in the middle of town – the local farmers transported the refuse away once a year to be spread as manure. Malt dust, soap ashes, brine, hair, decaying fish, offal, entrails, and blood were all used as manure."
Plague writers who "predicted" coronavirus pandemic .
In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, some plague doctors and physicians wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic items. The masks were designed to protect them from putrid air, which (according to the miasmatic theory of disease) was seen as the cause of infection. The design of these clothes has been attributed to Charles de Lorme, the chief physician to Louis XIII.
Many ancient cultures used molds, soil, and plants to treat bacterial infections. Tetracycline has been found in human skeletal remains in Egypt and the Sudan that are some 1,500 years old; it is speculated that it was present in materials consumed in the diet (Aminov). In ancient Serbia, Greece, and China, moldy bread was pressed against wounds to prevent infection. In Egypt, crusts of moldy wheat bread were applied on pustular scalp infections and “medicinal earth” was dispensed for its curative properties (Keyes). These remedies were believed to influence the spirits or the gods responsible for illness and suffering. Today we know that the occasional efficacy of these early treatments was due to the active metabolites and chemicals present in these concoctions, such as antimicrobial substances produced by the molds on bread.
Patent Medicines and Chemical Weapons
People living before the antibiotic era depended mainly on their immune system to survive infectious disease. However, they often sought a variety of largely untested remedies to treat their illnesses. These concoctions were of highly variable efficacy and safety and sometimes had no connection with the cure or relief from disease conditions. They were nonetheless patented, sold, and utilized by desperate people with no suitable alternatives.
The medieval Soutra hospital was built just off the Royal Road; the main route between England and Scotland, and dates back to 12th century. It was run by Augustinian monks looking after the poor, travellers, pilgrims and the elderly, as well as those who were unwell.
Dr Brian Moffat, led an excavation at Soutra Aisle during the 1980’s , and has led the Soutra Research Project since then. Dig findings from Soutra shed light on how those with psychiatric illnesses were treated, how epidemics were managed, and how dentistry and surgery in the Middle Ages was carried out. Surgeons’ Hall Museums are delighted to welcome Dr Moffat, lead archaeologist on the excavation, as he discusses the findings and sheds light of the mysteries of medical care in the middle ages.
The complete distilling apparatus consists of three parts: the "cucurbit" (Arabic ḳarʿa, Greek βίκος, bikos), the still pot containing the liquid to be distilled, which is heated by a flame; the "head" or "cap" (Arabic anbiḳ, Greek ἄμβιξ, ambix) which fits over the mouth of the cucurbit to receive the vapors, with an attached downward-sloping "tube" (Greek σωλήν, sōlēn), leading to the "receiver" (Arabic ḳābila, Greek ἄγγος, angos, or φιάλη, phialē) container. In the case of another distilling vessel, the retort, the "cap" and the "cucurbit" have been combined to form a single vessel. The anbik is also called the raʾs (head) of the cucurbit. The liquid in the cucurbit is heated or boiled; the vapour rises into the anbik, where it cools by contact with the walls and condenses, running down the spout into the receiver. A modern descendant of the alembic is the pot still, used to produce distilled beverages. https://howlingpixel.com/wiki/Alembic
Time of Leprosy: 11th Century to 14th Century
Leprosy had entered England by the 4th century and was a regular feature of life by 1050. Known today as Hansen's disease, in its extreme form it could cause loss of fingers and toes, gangrene, blindness, collapse of the nose, ulcerations, lesions and weakening of the skeletal frame. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1050-1485/time-of-leprosy/
Medicina Antiqua - Leafing through the facsimile edition
The Viennese manuscript of Medicina Antiqua, is one of the most significant manuscripts of its kind, not least for its precious illustration, a comprehensive medical and pharmaceutical manuscript in Latin, produced in the 1st half of the 13th century in Southern Italy, possibly in the environment of the Staufer court. This manuscript thus presents a testimony to the extremely popular reception of classical medical conceptions in the Middle Ages and in Modern Times.
The authors, or more correctly, compilers, refer more or less plainly, directly or indirectly, to classical standard works, such as the Materia Medica by Dioscorides, a well-known Greek botanist and physician of the 1st century.
Medieval medicine is neither a precursor to our modern medicine, nor a simplistic, primitive system. There are few similarities between medieval and modern medicine, especially in regard to the framework through which each approaches illness. During the medieval period, the body reflected one's state of health, and medieval doctors relied on the body as text.
However, medieval doctors had little concept of germs as the medium of disease and the cause of illness. While the body was known to degenerate with age, medieval doctors believed that a healthy body required a state of harmony or balance. An unhealthy body represented an imbalance, usually identified through a change or sign on the outside of the body, either on the skin or from an excreted fluid, such as urine. Thus the body becomes the symbolic text which a doctor needed to interpret in order first to diagnosis and then to cure.
Lacking any concept of viruses or bacteria as causes of illness, medieval doctors were left to reason that certain behaviors led to illness. There were three types of possible illnesses: those caused by the body's natural degeneration, those to which the body was predisposed, and those caused by immoderate living.
The connection between morality and illness is not a medieval creation, but part of the heritage of Greco-Roman medicine. Galen unified two competing theories, the Empiricists and the Dogmatists into one philosophy which became the foundation of medieval medicine. The Empiricists believed in experience as the greatest teacher of medical learning. The Dogmatists relied on a learned tradition and propounded a notion of a microcosm and macrocosm. The microcosm consisted of the four bodily humours: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Each of the four humours reflected the elements of the macrocosm: air, water, earth, and fire, respectively. The humours also had temperature and moisture properties. Blood was hot and wet, phlegm was cold and wet, black bile was cold and dry, and yellow bile was hot and dry. According to this theory, when a person became sick, one of the four humours was out of balance. To balance the humours, one needed to take a prescription, usually made from some combination of plants or animals. Doctors categorized all plants and animals by their temperature and moisture.
Galen believed that authoritative learning was important but must not be accepted blindly; "rather, [medical authorities] are authorities in as far as they are proved right" through clinical experience. Essentially, Galen saw medicine as a cumulative process in which one studied medical authorities and appended or altered the authoritative corpus through clinical experience. Galen's emphasis on immoderation as a cause of illness appealed especially to early Christians.
A third misconception about medieval medicine concerns ascribing the belief to medieval people that all illness was connected to moral failings. In fact, some illnesses were believed to occur naturally or as a result of old age.
The clearest literary example of both the influence of medicine on literature and the connection between morality and illness appears in our own adjectives: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholy. At one time, these adjectives referred both to the emotional and moral state of the individual as well as to his or her physical constitution. Each ... ailment corresponds to an emotional state--an emotional state that could lend itself to sin. The assumptions which underlie this poem are that the phlegmatic is prone to the sin of idleness, the sanguine is prone to the sins of lust and overindulgence, the choleric is prone to the sins of covetousness, and the melancholic is prone to the sins of deceit and envy. https://web.archive.org/web/20050306190053/http://www.the-orb.net:80/non_spec/missteps/ch4.html
Uploaded for amusement, not agreement with the highly-contrived confirmation-bias scraping-the-bottom-of-the-views-barrel argument. Admittedly, Dissociative Identity Disorder continues to be woefully under-diagnosed (usually misdiagnosed as bipolar) and inadequately treated by modern psychiatrists. However, that lamentable omission does not make centuries of sporadic episodes of lethal social contagion of mass outbreaks of dissociation trances plausible, let alone likely.
The videos claims: "From the 1200s through the 1600s [1020-1518], parts of Europe were afflicted with deadly, mysterious outbreaks of seemingly contagious, unstoppable dancing. While it's still unclear exactly why these "dancing plagues" happened, [ergot poisoning or] modern psychology [dissociative trance disorder, social contagion; religious ritual, sleep deprivation] may be able to provide some answers possible explanations." Most likely? Ergot poisoning.
Agriculture in the Middle Ages describes the farming practices, crops, technology, and agricultural society and economy of Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to approximately 1500. The Middle Ages are sometimes called the Medieval Age or Period. The Middle Ages are also divided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. The early modern period followed the Middle Ages.
Epidemics and climatic cooling caused a large decrease in the European population in the 6th century. Compared to the Roman period, agriculture in the Middle Ages in western Europe became more focused on self-sufficiency. The Feudal period began about 1000. The agricultural population under feudalism in northern Europe was typically organized into manors consisting of several hundred or more acres of land presided over by a Lord of the Manor, with a Roman Catholic church and priest. Most of the people living on the manor were peasant farmers or serfs who grew crops for themselves and either labored for the lord and church or paid rent for their land. Barley and wheat were the most important crops in most European regions; oats and rye were also grown, along with a variety of vegetables and fruits. Oxen and horses were used as draft animals. Sheep were raised for wool and pigs were raised for meat.
Wild rye is indigenous to Anatolia and was already domesticated there by the early Neolithic at the beginning of agriculture. Secale migrated to Central Europe as a weed among other cereals, and single grains of weed rye have been recorded there since the early Neolithic. The number of finds increased during the Bronze Age and Iron Age, and the status of rye changed from weed to crop plant, probably in the course of the early Iron Age. This acculturation of Secale cereale in central and eastern Europe was obviously independent of the earlier one in Anatolia. The first stages towards deliberate cultivation happened unintentionally through harvesting close to the ground, so that the rye was permanently represented in the seed corn. From this point rye was able to take advantage of its competitive strength on poor soils and in areas with unfavourable climate. The start of rye as a crop in its own right during the pre-Roman Iron Age and Roman period presumably took place independently in different areas. The expansion of intensive rye cultivation occurred in the Middle Ages. However, new finds from north-west Germany, which are presented here, show that in this area rye has been cultivated as a main crop on poor soils since the Roman period. In two maps all rye finds up to 1000 A.D. are shown, which after critical consideration can be regarded as cultivated rye.
Crop failures due to bad weather were frequent throughout the Middle Ages and famine was often the result. Despite the hardships, there is anthropometric evidence that medieval European men were taller (and therefore presumably better fed) than the men of the preceding Roman Empire and the subsequent early modern era.
The medieval system of agriculture began to break down in the 14th century with the development of more intensive agricultural methods in the Low Countries and after the population losses of the Black Death in 1347–1351 made more land available to a diminished number of farmers. Medieval farming practices, however, continued with little change in the Slavic regions and some other areas until the mid-19th century.
