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Medieval hardships (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by nifty@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[-] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 72 points 4 months ago

I always remind myself that way back then .... if you happened to cut yourself badly, there was a high likelihood that you could lose a limb or die from infection. They had treatments for stuff and they could be careful but all you needed was a chance infection (that is easily protected against today) and you could end up severely affecting your life or dying.

[-] Catoblepas 38 points 4 months ago

Even just a prick from a thorn while outside could give you tetanus, which was a super shitty way to die. People’s muscles spasmed so hard they could literally break their own bones.

Be sure to get your booster shot every 10 years!

[-] Amanduh@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago

That does sound rather unpleasant

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[-] Baku@aussie.zone 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Hell, even half of their "treatments" ended up making the problem worse or killing you even quicker

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 11 points 4 months ago

One common treatment for chickenpox was to drill a hole in the skull. Shockingly this wasn't very helpful

[-] SandmanXC@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

No patient complaints were registered, so it couldn't have been that bad either.

[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 6 points 4 months ago

But drilling a hole in your head did solve some other problems like brain swelling, so without knowing better and having no alternatives, I could see why one would try

[-] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago

It would have dealt with the swelling immediately but chances are the patient would have died from infection from the operation.

[-] atomicorange@lemmy.world 59 points 4 months ago

I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right.

[-] dudinax@programming.dev 51 points 4 months ago

Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

-- W. C. Fields

[-] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 47 points 4 months ago

I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.

Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.

[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 15 points 4 months ago

I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you'll get wine, in the right conditions.

Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.

[-] VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Was beer really an accident? We were getting fucked up on fermented fruit for a long long long time before beer was a thing so I guess I always assumed we made that on purpose. But thinking about it I guess it makes sense that it was discovered on accident much like the fermented fruit.

[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

Unlike fermented fruit, beer requires some processing by boiling the mash. I figure if someone was making porridge and forgot about it they'd end up with something beer-adjacent.

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[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

I was thinking someone dropped a piece of meat into the fire by accident.

[-] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 10 points 4 months ago

What do you get when you burn mead?

[-] Axefanatic@aussie.zone 14 points 4 months ago

Bochet. Basically caramelized honey mead.

[-] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago

Huh. That sounds good!

[-] weker01@feddit.de 2 points 4 months ago

And it is if aged well. Fresh it is disgusting for some reason.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 46 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

When they say wine they don't mean what you're thinking. When they say bread they definitely don't mean what you're thinking and I'd hate to think what the cheese was like.

People really don't have a grasp of how much effort goes into modern food production to make it the quality that it is.

It's fairly obvious when you think about it, there's a lot of documented evidence of people living on ships surviving almost entirely on beer. If that was modern beer they'd all be incapable of operating the ship after about 2 days, dead shortly after from alcohol poisoning, clearly that didn't happen.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Ive known alcoholics that drank 12-24 packs daily and still were perfectly functional. This is 4-5% abv beer, and they did all of the normal activities you would expect. If you didnt know they had a disease/addiction, you likely would never have noticed how much they had to drink that day. They easily consumed 2-3000 calories/day just from beer.

Human tolerance for alcohol is way, more adaptable than youre implying.

[-] Liz@midwest.social 18 points 4 months ago

You're both right. The beer people drank back then was usually very low alcohol content. It was essentially fermented just enough so that it would stay safe to drink for a while. There was stronger stuff, yes, but especially the stuff they had on ships was very weak.

[-] solsangraal@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 months ago

not saying anyone's wrong in this thread, but i would love to read sources on this

[-] Obi@sopuli.xyz 4 points 4 months ago

Same with the famous pirate rum.

[-] drosophila 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I don't know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.

There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they're not wonderbread they're also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they're not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.

[-] fsxylo@sh.itjust.works 41 points 4 months ago

Bread was water and flour and dirt, wine was vinegar, and cheese was "milk".

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 4 months ago

Cheese is still "milk"!

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 4 months ago

If your cheese is still milk then it's milk.

In much the same way that cheese isn't yogurt

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 months ago

Cheese is milk in the same way that beef is grass. It's all carbon chemistry in the end.

[-] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 4 months ago

Replace dirt with salt and that's modern artisanal sourdough.

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 30 points 4 months ago

I expect medieval bread that goes to peasants to be hard enough to work as hammers. The wine would probably be half water. The cheese, funnily enough, would probably be the best tasting thing in the home. We're talking about cheese that is supposed to last months on end without refrigeration. A wandering cockroach that gets to the cheese might be some extra seasoning for the peasant, too.

[-] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 4 months ago

Wine would definitely not be water because clean drinking water was more valuable than wine for sure.

[-] foxglove@feddit.org 4 points 4 months ago

Probably meaning taste/consistency wise if we compare them to wine we can buy

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[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 26 points 4 months ago

the cheese wasn’t even individually wrapped

[-] NakariLexfortaine@lemm.ee 23 points 4 months ago

And there was a chance your bread was moldy. But, hey, get the right kind of mold, and you get to start accusing people of witchcraft.

And the wine would be safe, but possibly heavily watered down to keep a barrel for longer.

[-] too_high_for_this@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's highly unlikely the witchcraft accusations were caused by ergotism.

It's kinda crazy how easily the ergot theory took over. For 200 years, it was widely accepted that it was a case of mass hysteria, moral panic, and religious extremism. Then someone hypothesized it could be ergotism because the reported symptoms are similar.

And people immediately took it as a fact, because a clear, single cause is much easier to explain.

Y'know, like how they blamed the "witches" for anything bad?

Why didn't anyone else develop ergotism? If their source of rye was contaminated, more people would have fallen ill.

Why did it only affect a handful of adolescent girls, who happened to be friends?

Why did another town 20 miles away have more accusations of witchcraft around the same time?

Why didn't they recognize the symptoms at the time? St Anthony's Fire was well-documented and treatable since the Middle Ages.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The wine would be served in a lead cup to make it taste sweeter.

[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 12 points 4 months ago

delicious heavy metal salts

[-] TTH4P@lemm.ee 20 points 4 months ago

The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho...

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 12 points 4 months ago

To be fair, that sounds like fast food.

[-] Drusas@kbin.run 8 points 4 months ago

Add a piece of fish and it's perfect.

[-] chaogomu@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

Fish cooked with sorrel and salt. But not as much salt as modern cooks use.

And then some fruits, berries, or veggies if they were in season.

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[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 4 points 4 months ago

Is people having the phone in their social media profile pic a deliberately-shit thing like when Youtubers are holding their tiny clip-on mic?

[-] Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Old school selfie style, from before screen facing cameras.

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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
695 points (100.0% liked)

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