history of medicine – Going Medieval

Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry

You know those little jokes that centre around a person with a PhD being on a plane, and someone asks for a doctor, and they say they aren’t that kind of doctor but the emergency involves their field of study? I love those. If you don’t know what I am rabbiting on about I mean these:

On sickness and conspiracy

I woke up this morning on, October the fifth in the year of our lord 2023, and was not a zombie. This is notable for reasons which will shortly become clear. Because I am not a zombie, this means that I had to get up and do my job. Unfortunately, as a part of said job, a thing that I have to deal with on a frustratingly regular basis is the fairly pervasive idea that medieval Europeans were somehow uniquely stupid. The foolish medieval person is usually proffered in comparison to the total brain genius who is making the statement, who is somehow simultaneously smarter than a medieval person, and yet hasn’t read a single book on medieval history or considered how to make any sort of social analysis at all.

Podcast alert: Medieval medicine on Sick to Death

I was lucky enough to chat with my friend Rebecca Rideal on the Sick to Death podcast about medieval medicine. It’s a really great podcast which focuses on telling history through objects. I hope you will enjoy it!

On Masculinity and Disease

Over the past few days I have, of course, been laughing very hard as we collectively watch Miss Rona skip through the White House staff like, well, a highly infectious virus because that is literally how it works? ANYWAY, while that is very very funny, it is not the thing I have been thinking about this week. Instead, what caught my attention was the interest from a huge swathe of Americans in relating to illness and the vanquishing thereof as a specifically masculine trait. By this, I mean, all the insistence that Trump can just man his way out of a disease and that other men are feminine for doing stuff like wearing masks.

Not every pandemic is the Black Death

Interesting times, no? We live in interesting times. Oh ho ho the times they are interesting. By that, of course, I mean that I am very bored, but at the same time so anxious I am giving myself headaches. Pandemics are not fun! Staying in your house is not fun! Worrying that people are going to die is not fun! Watching governments debate whether rich people’s wealth is more important than people dying is not fun!

This is not as bad as living through the Black Death, or the plague generally.

On the plague, sex, and rebellion

Our good friends over at A Bit Lit had me on to discuss the fourteenth century, sex, plague, and what happens when people get mad. Do have a watch!

On Medical Milestones, the Myth of Progress, and Textbooks, Part II

My loves, it’s a week later and I am still Big Mad at J. Stuart Showalter, textbook writer and noted basic. Now, this is understandable give that my man is low-key racist with his shall we say “approach” to the medicine of the Islamic world. However, that sort of racism is just the worst and most harmful type of ignorance of the several which permeate said timeline, this textbook, and our society’s approach to medieval history. There’s a whole lot more incorrect where that came from, and that is what we are going to discuss today.

On Medical Milestones, Being Racist, and Textbooks, Part I

Because my family allegedly loves me very much, and shows that by sending me screen shots of things that are guaranteed to wind me up, my cousin sent me a screen shot from her actual fucking university level textbook this weekend. This particular picture was so wrong, so ignorant, and has wound me up for so many reasons that I am going to have to spread my rage about it over two blog posts.

Are you ready for it?

You are not.

I assure you, medieval people bathed.

I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly.

Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true.

In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way.

This is not to say that getting clean was as easy for medieval people as it is for us now. But medieval people were very clever and had ways of getting around that.

On No Nut November

My loves, I am very sorry, but we have to talk about No Nut November. Why, you may ask, would I say something like that to you? And you would be right to do so. Why would I ask you to contemplate a month-long abstinence exercise for men propagated on reddit? The answer to that, sadly, is because the whole misguided, misogynist, pseudo-science binfire has all the hallmarks of medieval medical and theological thought on sex, and that is my job. I take no pleasure in saying this, because as you know, I think it is very important to be careful when using the word “medieval” to describe something. Yet, here we are.

For the up-until-this-point blissfully ignorant out there, No Nut November, (or NNN), was brought to us by the genius minds of Reddit, and the stated goal of these gentlemen is not to “nut” AKA orgasm for the month of November. (Yeah I’m not going to link this for you. It;s too weird.) Initially this idea spawned when some bright spark got a hold of one (1) study that showed a period of abstinence from masturbation in ten healthy men lead to a spike of testosterone production in the subjects. (Don’t even get me started on the sample size here.) This apparently is seen as a definitive good, and some dudes decided that they would refrain from jacking it for a month in order to get this extra hormone rush for some reason. (IDK. YKINMKATOK, I guess.)