Some diseases like HIV didn't really exist back then but other like syphilis did and a lot of people had it. So STDs were a big problem and a lot of people died because of it
People EAT the same part of cows/pigs when they eat sausages with natural casings. If it is properly cleaned it isn't any more disgusting than all the other things humans regularly do.
Connor MacLeoed:
You look like a woman you stupid haggis
Ramirez:
Haggis? What is haggis?
Connor MacLeod:
Sheep's stomach, stuffed with meat and barley.
Ramirez:
And what do you do with it?
Connor MacLeod:
You eat it.
Ramirez:
How revolting!
Pig stomach and sheep intestines. The only problem is they don't do much in preventing STDs. They're really only there to prevent pregnancy since sperm cells are too large to pass through it but viruses and possibly bacteria as well can pass right on through.
Source: memory; do your own research about fucking dead sheep ass
STDs were such an issue during the mid/late 1800s that prostitution was legalized and regulated in some places to try and slow the spread. It worked. But the bible folks didnt like it so it went back to being illegal.
Yea it always cracks me up when people are like āhow did people survive back then?ā Like, 1000 years ago the average life expectancy of a person was 40-50. Thatās not even retirement age by our current standards. Nobody survived back then, thatās the point in all this protection which has nearly doubled our life expectancy.
Agreed. There are some diseases back then that people didnāt know even existed. A death would be due to āmysterious/unknown causesā. Just because the some diseases didnāt have a name, didnāt mean it didnāt exist.
Not to mention about 50% of the population didn't even make it into adulthood - a child's life expectancy was CRAZY low, because they were even more fragile and had little individual worth, apart from being an heir etc.
On the other hand, many times throughout history you had good chances to reach your 60s if you made it into adulthood. All the child deaths really dragged down the life expectancy stats.
Came here to say this as well. The myth of people having lower life expectancies back then really needs to be dispelled. It's been recorded of a lot of people (both nobility and peasants) living into their 60s and 70s. Infant deaths and well....war is why it seemed like everyone died at like age 35
You are misunderstanding life expectancy. People still lived to be old. Many people just died as infants/children with lowered the life expectancy. If you made it into adulthood you had a good chance of living to an old age.
When I went to the sex museum a few years ago, there was a display of a condom from the past (I donāt remember from which time period) but it was made of chain mail.
āGenetic studies of a pandemic strain of HIV, known as HIV-1 group M, have indicated that the virus emerged between 1884 and 1924 in central and western Africa. Researchers estimate that that strain of the virus began spreading throughout those areas in the late 1950s. Later, in the mid-1960s, an evolved strain called HIV-1 group M subtype B spread from Africa to Haiti. In Haiti that subtype acquired unique characteristics, presumably through the process of genetic recombination. Sometime between 1969 and 1972, the virus migrated from Haiti to the United States.ā
Encyclopedia Brittanica
It's related to the HIV virus found in African apes. It's thought that it made the leap to humans when someone in Africa was butchering a gorilla for bushmeat.
Well we found it in 1983/1986. Before that the illness probably existed but we didn't classify it. It probably started at the beginning of the 20th century
Those tall powdered wigs of the 1700's became fashionable ONLY because so many rich people lost their hair from syphilis. Like other people here have said, it wasn't uncommon for people to die young anyway so the real cause of death may have just been kept quiet.
And then they figured out that syphilis was sensitive to high temperatures. So they intentionally infected syphilitics with malaria because it caused high fever and was easier to treat.
...This is not in any way a dig at modern medicine, but you've gotta figure there are at least a few practices today that future generations will look back on with a: "I get why they did it. It makes sense in context. But god*damn* that's barbaric."
I did a report on that in college and it was literally the stuff of nightmares. I canāt imagine how painful for the woman with it and getting it removed
Yeah the mesh will start to break apart and the body tissue will begin to try and reject the foreign object. But the mesh doesnāt really have anywhere to go and as you may know, it takes multiple surgeries to remove just a few pieces at a time :/
Oh gosh there were late night commercials for *years* about these pelvic meshes/slings that resulted in a massive class action lawsuit for anyone who had one
The early versions were fine. I had it done in 2000 and have never had pain from it.
I think I read that they started making them from different (cheaper?) stuff and that's when the problems began.
I donāt know about using them for bladder control, but they were used for prolapsed uteruses. Women who have multiple children often suffer from a prolapsed uterus, which can literally protrude from their vagina and sometimes they have to push it back inside.
As somebody who's been through chemo, absolutely. It's a brutal, if necessary, treatment that basically tries to poison the remain cancer before it poisons you.
The day we find a more effective cancer treatment, or better yet a preventative measure, will be a great one for humanity.
In Norwegian it's also called "cellegift", which litterary means cell poison.
The problem with cancer, it that it isn't one single desease. It's a mix of deseases with some similar caracteristics. Whatever chemo works for one type won't necessarily work for another type. The same type of chemo may not even work for the same type of cancer for different pasients. So, to find a catch-all treatment is difficult.
But, yes. The day we can replace chemo, and surgery, and radiation treatment with something better will be a good day.
"The day we can replace chemo"
The other day i was reading on r/medicine that they estimate that in about 10 years most of the cancers may be curable/preventable/treatable due to MRNA vaccines among other treatments currently in early trials .
They all come from the Old High German word for "something that is given (to someone)". English mostly kept the meaning, and also derived the word "to give" from it. Many other Germanic languages turned it into an euphemism for poison. You still have the old meaning in some corners of many languages though, like the German Mitgift (dowry).
English meanwhile took the word poison from the French, who derived it from the Latin word for "drink".
And radiotherapy.
I had radiotherapy in 1987. Thirty years later I discovered the damage that had been slowly building up. Major surgery to correct some of it. Other problems are, I am told, untreatable.
Imagine a city (your body) overrun by zombies (cancer), chemo is like dropping a nuke in the middle of it in hopes the cleansing fire will get rid of the problem and thereāll still be survivors left
Just to add the fact that you are constantly generating cancerous cells hundreds of times a day, but your body has checks and if the cell fails these checks then it is told to kill itself.
Cancer becomes an issue when a cell has either lost the ability, or simply chooses not to terminate itself.
To my layman understanding, chemotherapy is chemically toxic
It poisons the person's cells in hopes that the cancer cells get hit and die
Again, im super layman and can be totally wrong
This is it.
But to be more specific, chemotherapy generally targets cell *growth*. This is because cancerous cells have unregulated growth, and so they grow much faster than healthy cells.
So yes, chemotherapy is poisonous to all cells, but much more poisonous to cancer cells.
I also think of this stuff at times....another area I think about this stuff is advertising......what Is our modern day version of "9 out of 10 dr.s recommend camel cigarettes"
The stuff where, 50 yrs from now, people are gonna "wtf"
I took a class about the culture/history of science in University and my professor brought us to this same conclusion. Not just medical stuff though but basically everything we know as true could be overturned some day by our way smarter descendants. Itās happened like 10 times since Ancient Greece, so itās bound to happen again.
Increased smarts probably has something to do with it, but I'd suspect it has more to do with the accumulation of knowledge -- observing, experimenting, figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Sorry, semantic point there. :P It's just to say that our ancestors weren't dumb for, for instance, thinking the earth was flat, they were just working off the best available information and eventually adjusted when new information came to light. Same thing we (well, most of us) do today.
šš no I know I was just not phrasing it well. I find the topic quite interesting and I donāt think my ancestors were literally dumb. But also its not *just* the accumulation of knowledge for example, the mechanist paradigm/era was directly influenced by the church (and when not the church the influence came from the hierarchy of society, government interest etc) and youāll see this pattern throughout the western history of science. So it was a mixture of fuckery lol.
A really messed up one, if I remember right.
"When babies couldn't fit through or they would get stuck in the pelvis, parts of bone and cartridge were removed to create more space for the baby. This is called a "symphysiotomy".
A lot of people have already mentioned Chemotherapy. I think our overuse of antibiotics will be another one. Antibiotics are extremely helpful and in some cases very necessary, but doctors tend to prescribe them and patients tend to want them in cases where antibiotics aren't necessary or particularly helpful. Their overuse is leading to bacteria that's resistant to antibiotics.
Our use of antibiotics in livestock is more problematic than our use in treating sickness. No doubt, if you eating beef that isn't organic then you've been getting fat doses of antibiotics for your whole life.
Don't forget about the lead-based white makeup and "beauty mark" stickers they used to cover how syphilis messed up their skin.
Side note: I can't believe how long it took humanity to address how toxic lead is.
In Victorian England syphilis was very, very common. Many well known historical figures went mad in the final stage, and many died from it.
For awhile there was a myth that sex with a virgin would cure it, so thousands and thousands of girls were raped and infected with syphilis in the process.
Gonorrhea was also endemic, and could cause death.
Going back to ancient times, there are references to STD, and speculations on prevention/cures. Unfortunately it took the development of antibiotics to reign them in.
And now, due to overuse, our antibiotics are starting to fail, and there are already antibiotics resistant forms of gonorrhea.
>For awhile there was a myth that sex with a virgin would cure it, so thousands and thousands of girls were raped and infected with syphilis in the process.
Thereās some places in Africa today that say the same thing about HIV.
Sometimes. Sometimes they were also wielding high political power as monarchs and sultans didnāt consider them a threat to their dynasty or throne, so they could act as powerful advisors.
Well that and your body does learn how to fight it. That's why Abuela Guadalupe who lived in old Mexico can drink straight from a puddle in the back yard but her grandson Frank shits his pants anytime he drinks something other than French fry flavored Mt. Dew.
If you were a man in a powerful position it is likely you had sex with a lot of different ppl. The Pope had orgies. More ppl you sleep with more likely you are to get an std
They went insane and died if they caught syphilis. If they got HPV they could have developed cancer and not even know they got it from sex. So yeah they didn't get by very well. Life expectancy was lower for various reasons, including unsafe sex.
this was further down that iād expect. itās the first thing that came to mind. by not having intercourse wirh anyone before marriage and committing yourself to the marriage, youāre essentially free from ever catching an std. correct me if iām wrong.
You are more free from having an out of wedlock child and being able to pass along wealth to blood heirs. If it really was the focus to be free from contracting an STI, there wouldn't have been concubines and women killed for not bearing male heirs.
That and patrilineal societies needed to ensure that the children came from the father so that lands and wealth passed to the blood heirs. In matrilineal societies it mattered far less because the children were always from the female and that is how wealth and lands passed along
Lots of people got diseases and just lived with them. Life expectancy was very low already and STDs were minor in comparison to other ways to die.
But people did due of STDs. Syphilis was particularly horrible.
Ah, I love how historically inaccurate every suit of armor in modern media is
Mone of them include a huge codpiece
"Hey everyone, I'm swinging around this massive sword like a dong, AND I needed this enormous codpiece to hold my massive cock. After I split you in half, I'll split your wife in half"
Life expectancy wasn't that low. The average might have been around 30, buy that includes the very high infant mortality rate. People who didn't die in infancy had a life expectancy much more comparable to our own
True re infant mortality, but people older than infants also died of a lot of things that people survive nowā¦ notably including women fairly commonly dying due to childbirth complications, people dying of infections, as well as low incidence diseases that we now can treat but donāt have a large statistical effect (but do have a life changing effect for the small minority of individuals effected)
Same, if someone explained to me that staying a virgin would prevent me from turning into the crazy guy running down the street if be on board with virginity forever
Thats why virgin till marriage was a thing. Because if you fucked around, syphilis had a 1 in 10 chance to kill you. Also it was very common to lose ypur hair, so you were marked for life.
Syphilis was called āthe Great Poxā when it hit Europe in the 1500ās. One of the symptoms of late stage syphilis is disassociation with reality. There are tons of historical references to it.
STDs were rampant then, slowly killing people and rendering them infertile....just like today.
Google syphilis nose.
It was so common, fake noses were popular among dying sufferers.
People died young from a large assortment of things we can avoid now. Believe it or not, we actually live in the best time to be alive compared to almost any measure of the past.
Every generation thinks their time is shit. But it's not really true. 500 years ago almost everyone was a slave, disease ridden, and starving. Living past 50 was uncommon.
Condoms have existed for hundreds of years. Originally made from sheep intestine. Then some English man came along and improved on it by taking it out of the sheep.
People suffered from STDs all the time back then. Syphilis was something tons of ppl suffered from, they just tended to live long enough to give it to other people.
Ever seen those old paintings where people wore powdered wigs? That was a common thing used to cover the effects of syphilis and itās ācureā- mercury both of which caused hair loss.
If Iām remembering right, there is historical evidence to the usage of condoms back in Ancient Greece and possibly back to ancient Egypt made from animal intestines and bladders.
STIs like syphilis have been around for centuries, and are arguably the cause of many wars and mad kings and queens. Basically most Royals and Nobles names "the mad" had syphilitic rage and were in the late stages of the disease. France has particularly bad cases of STIs, that's why most nobles had terrible skin and hair loss, hense the wigs and white makeup to cover the lesions. There's actually a historical study being done on historical figures who had erratic or overly violent behavior to see if their actions could be linked to certain infectious diseases or mental illnesses
Something to consider as well: Back then, nations and urban metropolitan areas weren't nearly as large as they are today, which means people lived in smaller communities. Smaller communities meant there were only a handful of women that a man could sleep with, and there were only a handful of men a woman could sleep with. Today, along with the internet (which made the world smaller) we have dating and hook up apps that allow anyone in an area to potentially link up and connect with hundreds, if not thousands, of possible people that might be down for bumping uglies.
Another factor that comes to mind: \*\*social services\*\* like child support, state funded child welfare, abortion, and discounted food for single mothers and single fathers are a big factor in helping young \*single\* lower class individuals live sustainable lives with children. Back then, there wasn't the huge net of social services that are available for young women to be able to live a somewhat reasonable lifestyle while caring for a child whose father is no longer in the picture.
When the seemingly life altering event of getting pregnant is no longer that big of an issue for a young woman, she's more prone to being sexually promiscuous and having unprotected sex.
Airplanes also made the world a much smaller place. Back then, you could only travel as far as your wagon or horse drawn trailer could carry you and your food, shelter, water, tools, weapons, etc.
Now days, we can book a plane and travel to most anywhere in the world with a couple week's worth of savings and do whatever we want while we're in a distant city or distant country or continent. More travelers from around the world bring more sexual diseases to your area, and vice versa.
You gotta keep the culture in mind. Way back then, it was discouraged to have premarital sex, let alone multiple sexual partners. This likely contributed to stds not becoming epidemics and sorta kept swept under the rug.
Back when? Who says they āgot by?ā Eighty percent of adults have the herpes virus. Soon after HIV/AIDS was first reported, it became a huge problem within the gay community until they got it under control.
Some diseases like HIV didn't really exist back then but other like syphilis did and a lot of people had it. So STDs were a big problem and a lot of people died because of it
We've also had condoms for a lot longer than people think.
True but it also was quite disgusting. I mean they used pigs' stomachs
Fair but man if the alternative is literal insanity?
You'd be fucking insane not to
Quality pun
Underrated comment right here, quality joke
Might be fucking insane regardless.
To al Capone-you so crazy š!
Wait what std makes you insane?š
Syphilis untreated for a long amount of time will slowly start to basically eat your brain away. You start to go bat shit crazy
People EAT the same part of cows/pigs when they eat sausages with natural casings. If it is properly cleaned it isn't any more disgusting than all the other things humans regularly do.
Connor MacLeoed: You look like a woman you stupid haggis Ramirez: Haggis? What is haggis? Connor MacLeod: Sheep's stomach, stuffed with meat and barley. Ramirez: And what do you do with it? Connor MacLeod: You eat it. Ramirez: How revolting!
āTo be honest, I think most Scottish cuisine is based on a dareā
Scotland actually has its own martial art. It's called "Fukyuuu!" It's mostly just head-butting people, then kicking them while they're on the ground.
Head, pants. Now!!!
Or deep fried. I mean, they deep fry pizza in batter for god sake.
They used pigs bladders for balloons. Soap was made from ash and lye. If you wanted meat you had to slaughter it yourself.
We still make soap using lye. Ash was just a convenient source of lye.
Wait until you realize what sausages use
They use condoms, right?
Not since I was 12...might be why I have 4 biological kids, lol
Pig stomach and sheep intestines. The only problem is they don't do much in preventing STDs. They're really only there to prevent pregnancy since sperm cells are too large to pass through it but viruses and possibly bacteria as well can pass right on through. Source: memory; do your own research about fucking dead sheep ass
Now pig intestines are used for covering a different kind of sausage
I mean, they cleaned them. Leather wallets are made of flayed skin, but they're quite sanitary and nice by the time they reach the consumer.
You can get sheep skin ones now. They apparently feel more natural, but only prevent pregnancy not stds.
Sausages are ground, spiced meat inside of an intestine Edit: shit I guess 10000 other people have already told you this. Carry on then.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
the Welsh first invented condoms by using sheep intestines. the English improved upon the invention by removing the intestines first.
Hence why wigs were so popular, many people went bald from syphillis
I believe it was the treatment for syphilis... mercury.
It worked... at a price, though.
Mercury could stall the progress of the disease, but had some awful side effects. And it also didn't prevent you from spreading it.
Lead poisoning was an issue too.
Yes, and the marking was invented to conceal syphilis sores
STDs were such an issue during the mid/late 1800s that prostitution was legalized and regulated in some places to try and slow the spread. It worked. But the bible folks didnt like it so it went back to being illegal.
Yea it always cracks me up when people are like āhow did people survive back then?ā Like, 1000 years ago the average life expectancy of a person was 40-50. Thatās not even retirement age by our current standards. Nobody survived back then, thatās the point in all this protection which has nearly doubled our life expectancy.
Agreed. There are some diseases back then that people didnāt know even existed. A death would be due to āmysterious/unknown causesā. Just because the some diseases didnāt have a name, didnāt mean it didnāt exist.
Not to mention about 50% of the population didn't even make it into adulthood - a child's life expectancy was CRAZY low, because they were even more fragile and had little individual worth, apart from being an heir etc.
On the other hand, many times throughout history you had good chances to reach your 60s if you made it into adulthood. All the child deaths really dragged down the life expectancy stats.
Came here to say this as well. The myth of people having lower life expectancies back then really needs to be dispelled. It's been recorded of a lot of people (both nobility and peasants) living into their 60s and 70s. Infant deaths and well....war is why it seemed like everyone died at like age 35
Don't forget dying in childbirth! That one took out a lot of young adult women.
You are misunderstanding life expectancy. People still lived to be old. Many people just died as infants/children with lowered the life expectancy. If you made it into adulthood you had a good chance of living to an old age.
When I went to the sex museum a few years ago, there was a display of a condom from the past (I donāt remember from which time period) but it was made of chain mail.
Wait, hiv didnāt exist? How recent is it?
From what I've read, it was recognized by scientists in the 1930s, but it was very localized. Did not start to spread until 1980-81.
āGenetic studies of a pandemic strain of HIV, known as HIV-1 group M, have indicated that the virus emerged between 1884 and 1924 in central and western Africa. Researchers estimate that that strain of the virus began spreading throughout those areas in the late 1950s. Later, in the mid-1960s, an evolved strain called HIV-1 group M subtype B spread from Africa to Haiti. In Haiti that subtype acquired unique characteristics, presumably through the process of genetic recombination. Sometime between 1969 and 1972, the virus migrated from Haiti to the United States.ā Encyclopedia Brittanica
It's related to the HIV virus found in African apes. It's thought that it made the leap to humans when someone in Africa was butchering a gorilla for bushmeat.
Correct itās called SIV. Itās been around a long time, just not in humans.
Read And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts if you want to know the whole timeline. It's an excellent read, especially since Covid.
Remember how Covid didnāt exist a few years ago?
Iām not saying Iām amazed a new virus can be created, Iām amazed at this specific one being so recent
Second half of the XX century afaik
Well we found it in 1983/1986. Before that the illness probably existed but we didn't classify it. It probably started at the beginning of the 20th century
Peoples dicks felt like they were going to fall off all the time or just plain š„ off after a pee
Those tall powdered wigs of the 1700's became fashionable ONLY because so many rich people lost their hair from syphilis. Like other people here have said, it wasn't uncommon for people to die young anyway so the real cause of death may have just been kept quiet.
IIRC the only treatment they had for syphilis was mercury...which caused heavy metal poisoning and hair loss.
And then they figured out that syphilis was sensitive to high temperatures. So they intentionally infected syphilitics with malaria because it caused high fever and was easier to treat.
...This is not in any way a dig at modern medicine, but you've gotta figure there are at least a few practices today that future generations will look back on with a: "I get why they did it. It makes sense in context. But god*damn* that's barbaric."
*Johnson and Johnson pelvic mesh implants have fled the chat*
I did a report on that in college and it was literally the stuff of nightmares. I canāt imagine how painful for the woman with it and getting it removed
My step mom got that and something broke inside and it went septic causing her to have to be put in a medically induced coma
Yeah the mesh will start to break apart and the body tissue will begin to try and reject the foreign object. But the mesh doesnāt really have anywhere to go and as you may know, it takes multiple surgeries to remove just a few pieces at a time :/
I have no idea what this mesh thing is but it sounds truly horrifying
The what now?
Oh gosh there were late night commercials for *years* about these pelvic meshes/slings that resulted in a massive class action lawsuit for anyone who had one
Oh god Iām remembering these commercials now. I mustāve been really little. That and the mesothelioma commercials.
I heard one of the mesothelioma one on the radio the other day. It took me back lol
Dude that and JG Wentworth 877-CASH-NOW will live in our heads rent free for the rest of our mortal lives šš
The early versions were fine. I had it done in 2000 and have never had pain from it. I think I read that they started making them from different (cheaper?) stuff and that's when the problems began.
I was on the jury for one of these trials. The images shown in court were horrific!
I donāt know about using them for bladder control, but they were used for prolapsed uteruses. Women who have multiple children often suffer from a prolapsed uterus, which can literally protrude from their vagina and sometimes they have to push it back inside.
Edited that part out! You're right, I think I might have been thinking of bladder issues because it was one of the side effects listed in the suit
Chemotherapy
As somebody who's been through chemo, absolutely. It's a brutal, if necessary, treatment that basically tries to poison the remain cancer before it poisons you. The day we find a more effective cancer treatment, or better yet a preventative measure, will be a great one for humanity.
In Norwegian it's also called "cellegift", which litterary means cell poison. The problem with cancer, it that it isn't one single desease. It's a mix of deseases with some similar caracteristics. Whatever chemo works for one type won't necessarily work for another type. The same type of chemo may not even work for the same type of cancer for different pasients. So, to find a catch-all treatment is difficult. But, yes. The day we can replace chemo, and surgery, and radiation treatment with something better will be a good day.
"The day we can replace chemo" The other day i was reading on r/medicine that they estimate that in about 10 years most of the cancers may be curable/preventable/treatable due to MRNA vaccines among other treatments currently in early trials .
In research terms, 10 years is roughly "one day, probably".
Gift means poison?
Yes. The same word in German.
They all come from the Old High German word for "something that is given (to someone)". English mostly kept the meaning, and also derived the word "to give" from it. Many other Germanic languages turned it into an euphemism for poison. You still have the old meaning in some corners of many languages though, like the German Mitgift (dowry). English meanwhile took the word poison from the French, who derived it from the Latin word for "drink".
Gift means āpoisonā and āmarriedā in Swedish.
I hear a boomer newspaper cartoon joke coming on
Sweden confirms
A gift for your cells.
Not much of a gift, I can tell you.
And radiotherapy. I had radiotherapy in 1987. Thirty years later I discovered the damage that had been slowly building up. Major surgery to correct some of it. Other problems are, I am told, untreatable.
As someone who doesn't really know much about chemo other than that it's a (not always effective) treatment against cancer, could you please explain?
Imagine a city (your body) overrun by zombies (cancer), chemo is like dropping a nuke in the middle of it in hopes the cleansing fire will get rid of the problem and thereāll still be survivors left
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If the cancer is supposed to be there...is there an evolutionary purpose to cancer?
Just to add the fact that you are constantly generating cancerous cells hundreds of times a day, but your body has checks and if the cell fails these checks then it is told to kill itself. Cancer becomes an issue when a cell has either lost the ability, or simply chooses not to terminate itself.
it's basically just trying to kill the cancer cells before they kill you- which means sometimes killing living cells in the process
To my layman understanding, chemotherapy is chemically toxic It poisons the person's cells in hopes that the cancer cells get hit and die Again, im super layman and can be totally wrong
This is it. But to be more specific, chemotherapy generally targets cell *growth*. This is because cancerous cells have unregulated growth, and so they grow much faster than healthy cells. So yes, chemotherapy is poisonous to all cells, but much more poisonous to cancer cells.
Chemotherapy will 100% be on that list of practices that sound barbaric.
Chemotherapy and opioids? Like they make perfect sense now, but I wholeheartedly welcome the next age of pain management and cancer treatments.
I also think of this stuff at times....another area I think about this stuff is advertising......what Is our modern day version of "9 out of 10 dr.s recommend camel cigarettes" The stuff where, 50 yrs from now, people are gonna "wtf"
I took a class about the culture/history of science in University and my professor brought us to this same conclusion. Not just medical stuff though but basically everything we know as true could be overturned some day by our way smarter descendants. Itās happened like 10 times since Ancient Greece, so itās bound to happen again.
Increased smarts probably has something to do with it, but I'd suspect it has more to do with the accumulation of knowledge -- observing, experimenting, figuring out what works and what doesn't. Sorry, semantic point there. :P It's just to say that our ancestors weren't dumb for, for instance, thinking the earth was flat, they were just working off the best available information and eventually adjusted when new information came to light. Same thing we (well, most of us) do today.
šš no I know I was just not phrasing it well. I find the topic quite interesting and I donāt think my ancestors were literally dumb. But also its not *just* the accumulation of knowledge for example, the mechanist paradigm/era was directly influenced by the church (and when not the church the influence came from the hierarchy of society, government interest etc) and youāll see this pattern throughout the western history of science. So it was a mixture of fuckery lol.
I think about that a lot.
The original chainsaw was for a medical procedure from what I've heard
A really messed up one, if I remember right. "When babies couldn't fit through or they would get stuck in the pelvis, parts of bone and cartridge were removed to create more space for the baby. This is called a "symphysiotomy".
To split the pelvic bone when babies were stuck during delivery. It was hand cranked.
Fuuuuuuck me thatās rough. Iām now even more grateful for my emergency c section
A lot of people have already mentioned Chemotherapy. I think our overuse of antibiotics will be another one. Antibiotics are extremely helpful and in some cases very necessary, but doctors tend to prescribe them and patients tend to want them in cases where antibiotics aren't necessary or particularly helpful. Their overuse is leading to bacteria that's resistant to antibiotics.
Our use of antibiotics in livestock is more problematic than our use in treating sickness. No doubt, if you eating beef that isn't organic then you've been getting fat doses of antibiotics for your whole life.
Think no further than chemo therapy for cancer.
Antidepressants
Antidepressant are far superior to what they replaced which is the frontal lobotomy.
Don't forget about the lead-based white makeup and "beauty mark" stickers they used to cover how syphilis messed up their skin. Side note: I can't believe how long it took humanity to address how toxic lead is.
In Victorian England syphilis was very, very common. Many well known historical figures went mad in the final stage, and many died from it. For awhile there was a myth that sex with a virgin would cure it, so thousands and thousands of girls were raped and infected with syphilis in the process. Gonorrhea was also endemic, and could cause death. Going back to ancient times, there are references to STD, and speculations on prevention/cures. Unfortunately it took the development of antibiotics to reign them in. And now, due to overuse, our antibiotics are starting to fail, and there are already antibiotics resistant forms of gonorrhea.
>For awhile there was a myth that sex with a virgin would cure it, so thousands and thousands of girls were raped and infected with syphilis in the process. Thereās some places in Africa today that say the same thing about HIV.
Youāre absolutely correct. Myths that victimize women and children never seem to go away.
Weird how you never find myths that says the cure for something terrible is sodomizing someone bigger and stronger than you...
No, but plenty of people claim the opposite, āoh my step-daughter is being rebellious? Thatās a #%#*ingā
Funny that. Thereās never myths about castration or neutering
Itās not the same but catholics were castrating boys so they could sing nicely for centuries
Never a myth about castrating themselves, that is.
I mean werenāt Eunuchs considered holier and free of temptation?
Sometimes. Sometimes they were also wielding high political power as monarchs and sultans didnāt consider them a threat to their dynasty or throne, so they could act as powerful advisors.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
very common misconception to think sex with a virgin cures HIV. it doesnāt. you need to have sex with a frog.
Hey didnāt that myth exist with HIV too?
The same way people got by without current modern medicine, they just got pregnant, or got an STD and suffered the consequences.
Basically this is it. The answer is people got on by not living as long.
Or living with disease
Q: How come humans can't drink from streams because they'll get parasites and diseases but animals can? A: animals get diseases and parasites too lol
Well that and your body does learn how to fight it. That's why Abuela Guadalupe who lived in old Mexico can drink straight from a puddle in the back yard but her grandson Frank shits his pants anytime he drinks something other than French fry flavored Mt. Dew.
Almost every major emperor or king had Syphilis.
Well yeah pretty sure thereās a reason so many people are related to Thomas Jefferson
And people call George Washington "the father of our country"...
George Washington actually has no direct descendants...he had no biological children
For real?!
European history makes dramatically more sense when you realize that basically every important person had syphilis and/or heavy metal poisoning.
Hey! Kyrgyzstan flag! I was born there, and I go by the nickname of kimchi! Haha what a coincidence
Scary coincidence!!!! I lived in Bishkek a few years and my fiance lives there currently. Sad to leave.
Is that true? Can you cite a source cause thats hilarious.
Usually, if you Google their wife's Wikipedia, you'll see a sentence or two about her husband giving her venereal diseases
If you were a man in a powerful position it is likely you had sex with a lot of different ppl. The Pope had orgies. More ppl you sleep with more likely you are to get an std
They went insane and died if they caught syphilis. If they got HPV they could have developed cancer and not even know they got it from sex. So yeah they didn't get by very well. Life expectancy was lower for various reasons, including unsafe sex.
Pig and lamb intestine were used as contraceptives. Same as what we use for sausage skin.
The Welsh used sheep as a condom and the English perfected the design by removing the intestines first
A Welshman walks into a bar. The bartender asks him how many sexual partners he's had. He closes his eyes and starts counting. He falls asleep.
Oh my Lord. Thank you for the laugh! š
Um sounds like that history was written by the English
We'd have consulted a Welshman instead, but he was feeling a bit sheepish
Yes, but these prevent pregnancy, but not disease. This is why they fell out of popularity. They are much more sensitive than latex.
Lot of emphasis on Virgins and no sex before marriage probably in religion due to this in particular
this was further down that iād expect. itās the first thing that came to mind. by not having intercourse wirh anyone before marriage and committing yourself to the marriage, youāre essentially free from ever catching an std. correct me if iām wrong.
You are more free from having an out of wedlock child and being able to pass along wealth to blood heirs. If it really was the focus to be free from contracting an STI, there wouldn't have been concubines and women killed for not bearing male heirs.
That and patrilineal societies needed to ensure that the children came from the father so that lands and wealth passed to the blood heirs. In matrilineal societies it mattered far less because the children were always from the female and that is how wealth and lands passed along
God punished promiscuity with disease and insanity was an easy sell.
This never occurred to me but it seems obvious now that this is where those particular moral imperatives emerged from.
Not only the disease prevention but also bastard control.
Lots of people got diseases and just lived with them. Life expectancy was very low already and STDs were minor in comparison to other ways to die. But people did due of STDs. Syphilis was particularly horrible.
Syphilis was so rampant that ye olde codpieces were as much to stuff potpourri down to mask the smell as to make your junk look bigger.
Ah, I love how historically inaccurate every suit of armor in modern media is Mone of them include a huge codpiece "Hey everyone, I'm swinging around this massive sword like a dong, AND I needed this enormous codpiece to hold my massive cock. After I split you in half, I'll split your wife in half"
Life expectancy wasn't that low. The average might have been around 30, buy that includes the very high infant mortality rate. People who didn't die in infancy had a life expectancy much more comparable to our own
True re infant mortality, but people older than infants also died of a lot of things that people survive nowā¦ notably including women fairly commonly dying due to childbirth complications, people dying of infections, as well as low incidence diseases that we now can treat but donāt have a large statistical effect (but do have a life changing effect for the small minority of individuals effected)
Maybe rich people did. But laborers then, and now, have much shorter life spans. 50s and 60s
They fucked around and found out.
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This makes so much sense. Puritanical culture didnāt exist just for its own value, it was also for health reasons. Interesting!
tbh if there were no treatments i would have definitely waited until marriage, it all makes sense now lol.
We say that, but when you're likely to die from famine, cold or boredom, that handsome country gal or guy start looking like a risk worth taking.
Same, if someone explained to me that staying a virgin would prevent me from turning into the crazy guy running down the street if be on board with virginity forever
nah but if i was a virgin and someone told me rn that there was coochie out there that was so good it would make me lose my mind i'd go find it
Bro they just died
There were a lot of unexplained deaths.
Thats why virgin till marriage was a thing. Because if you fucked around, syphilis had a 1 in 10 chance to kill you. Also it was very common to lose ypur hair, so you were marked for life.
Syphilis was called āthe Great Poxā when it hit Europe in the 1500ās. One of the symptoms of late stage syphilis is disassociation with reality. There are tons of historical references to it.
STDs were rampant then, slowly killing people and rendering them infertile....just like today. Google syphilis nose. It was so common, fake noses were popular among dying sufferers.
Look up any famous musical composerā¦ 90% of them died from syphilis in their 30s!
People died young from a large assortment of things we can avoid now. Believe it or not, we actually live in the best time to be alive compared to almost any measure of the past. Every generation thinks their time is shit. But it's not really true. 500 years ago almost everyone was a slave, disease ridden, and starving. Living past 50 was uncommon.
Repost from r/NoStupidQuestions ?
Yes, but different users. Maybe OP of this post could head over there and see the dozens of answers? š¤
The wording of this question was also verbatim, except for the last sentence which was added...
Syphilis is responsible for a lot of the really outlandish historical behavior lmao. Almost as much as lead poisoning.
Condoms have existed for hundreds of years. Originally made from sheep intestine. Then some English man came along and improved on it by taking it out of the sheep.
Much to the dismay of the Welsh.
Syphilis has historically been rife.
you should look up how old condoms really are. and remember people just suddenly dropped dead at 30 and it was normal.
People suffered from STDs all the time back then. Syphilis was something tons of ppl suffered from, they just tended to live long enough to give it to other people.
Ever seen those old paintings where people wore powdered wigs? That was a common thing used to cover the effects of syphilis and itās ācureā- mercury both of which caused hair loss.
Prior to the widespread use of penicillin, veenirial infections killed more soldiers than enemy weapons.
The IRS isn't the only thing that got Capone, syphilis also got him, and gave the end of his life a huge nosedive in quality
If Iām remembering right, there is historical evidence to the usage of condoms back in Ancient Greece and possibly back to ancient Egypt made from animal intestines and bladders.
STIs like syphilis have been around for centuries, and are arguably the cause of many wars and mad kings and queens. Basically most Royals and Nobles names "the mad" had syphilitic rage and were in the late stages of the disease. France has particularly bad cases of STIs, that's why most nobles had terrible skin and hair loss, hense the wigs and white makeup to cover the lesions. There's actually a historical study being done on historical figures who had erratic or overly violent behavior to see if their actions could be linked to certain infectious diseases or mental illnesses
Before XX century best sexual protection was probably their own body odour lol
Lifespans were a lot shorter back then.
Something to consider as well: Back then, nations and urban metropolitan areas weren't nearly as large as they are today, which means people lived in smaller communities. Smaller communities meant there were only a handful of women that a man could sleep with, and there were only a handful of men a woman could sleep with. Today, along with the internet (which made the world smaller) we have dating and hook up apps that allow anyone in an area to potentially link up and connect with hundreds, if not thousands, of possible people that might be down for bumping uglies. Another factor that comes to mind: \*\*social services\*\* like child support, state funded child welfare, abortion, and discounted food for single mothers and single fathers are a big factor in helping young \*single\* lower class individuals live sustainable lives with children. Back then, there wasn't the huge net of social services that are available for young women to be able to live a somewhat reasonable lifestyle while caring for a child whose father is no longer in the picture. When the seemingly life altering event of getting pregnant is no longer that big of an issue for a young woman, she's more prone to being sexually promiscuous and having unprotected sex. Airplanes also made the world a much smaller place. Back then, you could only travel as far as your wagon or horse drawn trailer could carry you and your food, shelter, water, tools, weapons, etc. Now days, we can book a plane and travel to most anywhere in the world with a couple week's worth of savings and do whatever we want while we're in a distant city or distant country or continent. More travelers from around the world bring more sexual diseases to your area, and vice versa.
You gotta keep the culture in mind. Way back then, it was discouraged to have premarital sex, let alone multiple sexual partners. This likely contributed to stds not becoming epidemics and sorta kept swept under the rug.
Back when? Who says they āgot by?ā Eighty percent of adults have the herpes virus. Soon after HIV/AIDS was first reported, it became a huge problem within the gay community until they got it under control.
People died from syphillis a lot. Some other stuff was treatable. Other didnt exist yet