Never give up, even in the face of terrible odds

0:00Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Green's Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels, and crave-worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon Brussels side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to Sweetgreen, featuring fall's best dressed.

0:42Make your move. Order on the Sweetgreen app. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

1:15Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

1:46This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom-scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Never give up because sick people in the 17th century didn't, even when the chances of them recovering from illnesses were slim.

2:19They still plugged on and kept trying cures to bring them round. In this episode of Life Lessons from History, from History Extra, my guest, Alan Whithey, takes inspiration from that in his life today, when he's facing up to illness and in his general life resilience. On an unrelated note, this conversation also includes advice on effective beard maintenance. My name's Dave Musgrove and the concept of this podcast is simple. I find great historians and archaeologists and ask them to propose a lesson from history that might help us live happier, healthier, better or more productive lives today.

2:53And then we chat about it. It's the history, wellbeing crossover that you didn't know you needed, but hopefully you might enjoy. I have a great guest today. I am very excited to welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Alan Withy, who is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. He's an expert in medical history, travel history, and also, interestingly, beards. In fact, that is a topic that you and I have discussed on the History Extra podcast a few years ago now. Am I writing and remembering that the term for beards is pognology? Is that the word? Pogonology, yes. So if you study beards, you are a pogonotomist.

3:34Do you regularly get accosted in the street for your pogonometry? No, not anymore. It's tapered off a bit these days. I've moved on to other areas now, but I think I will never shake off the mantle of Beard's historian. Absolutely not. And maybe we'll discuss Beard's briefly in this podcast, who knows. But anyway, that's not where we're going in this life lesson. What we're going to talk about is a slightly more medical approach. What you proposed is that we should never give up in the spirit of a 17th century patient. So drop us into the topic. Where are we going with this? Introduce us to the idea of never giving up.

4:10Okay, so we're entering the world of 17th and 18th century medicine here, so it's a period that traditionally we would think of as all sort of plague doctors and doom and gloom and epidemics and pandemics and all the rest of it. So it's easy to assume that people in the past just think, oh well, something's gone wrong with me, I'm just going to wait for the scythe of the grim reaper to fall. But in actual fact, that's very, very far from the truth, and what we'll hopefully chat about today is that they have a remarkably stoic attitude towards illness and rather than giving up they actually do the complete opposite and adopt what I will call a carpet bombing approach to illness and I think that and the sort of literally never say die attitude they have is something that is a life lesson that would be good for all of us.

5:00Okay well that is good we will drill into this then but to be clear you mentioned sort of plague you know this was a period when there was some pretty bad stuff going around in the form of actual plague in the mid-17th century so there were things to be rightly concerned about yes so as you say plague bubonic and mnemonic plague which is the one that gets forgotten but is equally unpleasant we have smallpox dysentery typhus all manner of influenzas and of course they're the major killers but what we forget is that it's the day-to-day stuff that's often the more troubling because it's the it's the minor stuff for which there isn't the biomedical approach the modern medical approach that we have isn't there so even you know even a cold could kill you in the 17th century okay could it a cold could kill you in the 17th century i'm gonna have to ask you to justify that well um if it becomes let's say a chest infection a pulmonary infection that's untreated then yeah it can develop into something that can potentially be fatal, can develop into pneumonia and so on.

6:02So yes, even a cold, if it's untreated, can be fatal. Yeah, okay. So obviously, people have to be careful. People have to be on their metal thinking about their health and well-being. Now look, if you start feeling a bit peaky today, chances are that you will maybe consult Dr. Google in the first instance and probably find out the worst case scenario in a matter of moments and regret that decision. But what sort of information was available to people in your period if they started to feel unwell? Right. So yeah, absolutely. The doctor internet is the worst possible physician. But in the 17th century, what you have is a massive amount of medical information that's available from all sorts of sources.

6:43And some of them are still with us today. And in their approach to illness, people in the 17th century are quite similar to us. So medicine begins at home in that period every household is its own kind of storehouse of medical knowledge so the first people you would consult would be your family then you would move out to friends neighbors social networks all those kind of people informal sources the next option is medical practice the old idea is that there are hardly any doctors around that's not true either there are practitioners of every kind everywhere. In this tiniest village in the most remote part of the country, you will find medical practitioners.

7:28It just depends how we define them. If we stop looking for university trained, licensed, apprenticed, whatever, medical practitioners with formal titles, medical tasks can be undertaken by a whole range of different local people, even from cunning folk, informal healers clergy blacksmiths even will take out your teeth for you if you if you have a sore tooth because they have the the metal tools and the upper body strength there's a massive range of people from whom you can seek knowledge and opinion okay cunning folk just tell us a little bit more about that so cunning folk are i suppose we could call them magical healers but they're the ones who kind of they sometimes can be charmers they can put healing charms they can charm your cattle, they give you remedies in the form of prayers and things to say out loud.

8:22So they're kind of slightly mystical, slightly magical figures. And they are everywhere, especially in maybe more, especially in rural areas, but not exclusively. And how would you engage their services? Presumably you'd have to pay to access that sort of resource. In some cases, they'll treat for free. And even let's go to the sort of formal end of practice, is some practitioners will just treat the poor for free as a charitable measure anyway. But yes, cunning folk have a reputation as healers in a local community. So they may charge a token amount. Sometimes I've come across records where they'll ask for a meal for their services.

9:01It can be something like that. So it doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. Maybe it's not the right way to frame it, but I'll ask the question. So the people who are the licensed university educated people, are they seen to be kind of the top of the tree? That's where either you went if you were someone at the top of society or kind of a last resort is either those two statements correct both really i mean certainly physicians there's three kinds of main types traditionally the physicians the barbers and barber surgeons and the apothecaries each of whom have their own role apothecaries very common across the country barbers are very common again in small villages physicians really only in large large towns that have got some sort of infrastructure they see themselves as the top of the tree.

9:44But in reality, what they do is very, very similar to what even the sort of village practitioner will do. There's a common body of medical knowledge around from which people can draw. Okay, so let's just kind of scenario plan this. So let's say I'm a reasonably well-to-do man living in, I don't know, I'm living in Swansea maybe in 1680. I've developed a bit of a cough and I'm not too happy about it. What am I going to do? Well, the first thing you're going to do is consider your own humoral balance right that's analogous to what we do and as i said to return to what i said a minute ago medicine begins at home you you kind of make an assessment yourself of how how ill do i actually feel self-confessed hypochondriac a headache is an absolute calamity to me i'm start without even goo i don't need doctor internet to tell me this is likely to be bad for me but depending on your humoral balance you will think is this something i can treat myself because as we said treatment begins at home or is this something that feels like it could be worse so they are on constant symptom watch the next stage then would be to and they will tell people about this so they will consult a variety of opinions not just today where we think okay headache chemists tablets home a 17th century person would see that as the first maybe approach then they start asking for multiple others.

11:06So that would be the first stage. They'd start seeking opinions. Before we go on, how do we know this, by the way? How do we know what 17th century people felt about illness? It's just there in their records, really, that if you look at the diaries of people at the time, and multiple other ways you can access it, but just the range of people that they consult. Samuel Peeper's diary, for example, often does this where he will say that he's spoken to one you know he's told his family or he's consulted one practitioner then he goes to another one so it's not that you have just one opinion you're looking for multiple yeah samuel peeps famously interested in his bowel movements well indeed but equally constantly when we look at his diary you can see this in action this symptom watch he very often notes something's gone wrong and just one out of the many he dips his feet in the Thames one day because it's a hot day but then he he catches cold and he he's absolutely sure that he's that it's because he's done that and it's different different way of understanding the body but that's caused it I mean if you tip your feet in the Thames today you're probably not going to be very well afterwards the way it's going but Peeps is just one of these ones that tells us about who they are consulting and for what and just for any listeners who aren't aware of something Peeps I'm sure they all are but he's a famous diarist living in London at the time of the of the plague in the mid-17th century, and his diaries are very, very comprehensive about what he does, and also his bodily movements.

12:29As I said, he maintains a keen interest in that, and he's also a famous administrator and does all sorts of interesting things as well. So that's Samuel Pepys. So, okay, so sorry, back to my scenario. Okay, so I've kind of consulted my close family, I've consulted myself, and I've decided, actually, this isn't good. Where do I go next? I'm sort of still feeling a bit rough. okay so if you can read which would which would mark you out as quite unusual in that period but there is plenty of available knowledge in medical self-help books so these are the equivalent of google there's lots of sort of every man his own physician titles where you could basically run through the index of stuff see what matches see what the prognosis is and see what's recommended if you can't read though one of the striking features about medicine in this period is that it's very much, let's call it, let's give it the fancy-dancy term, a knowledge economy.

13:23So in other words, people who can read share their knowledge verbally, and that goes into a kind of knowledge bank. People in this period can internalise and remember a lot more than we can. So they will each have a tried and tested remedy for what you've got. That's almost a certainty. The other thing that's often kept in families is a manuscript remedy collection and some fantastic examples of these survive so think of a modern cookery recipe book and then translate that sort of to medicine instead so you know if you've got a headache do this and those are very much active documents when they work people say they work and they they do things like they put a little pointy hand next to it um once i've seen a smiley face almost like an 8th 17th century emoji right and little comments.

14:15And my favorite of those would be this I like. So yeah, so there's lots of ways that they can get at that knowledge. And just like with cookery, I suppose, it's a very good analogy. Instead of there being one recipe for whatever it is, they will be multiple. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins, Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes.

15:12Make your move. Order on the Sweetgreen app. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

15:45Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

16:15And I mean, obviously people listening to this will be thinking 17th century, 18th century medicine can't have been very effective, can't have been terribly scientific, probably some ridiculous remedies involved. You, I'm sure, will sort of rail against that idea of them being ridiculous, but give us a couple of the more surprising things that people did and then explain why we shouldn't ridicule people for engaging in these approaches. Right, you're absolutely right. It's my sworn mission to bat away the idea that stuff is mad, but I will caveat that by saying now and again, even as an historian who's been looking at these things for 20 years, you come across things that are so utterly baffling that you think this is some guys in a tavern in 1650 having a laugh things like for example using a grated stag's pizzle we don't need to look too far into the etymology of the word pizzle to understand that it relates to an element of anatomy that wouldn't suit a polite podcast right a great a grated dried stag's pizzle for treating stomach complaints frying cobwebs in salad oil putting your stomach if you've got a stomach ache, dropping fresh goose dung in your eye if you've got a stye.

17:28But my all-time favourite would have to be the oil of swallows, which is for shrunk sinews or a withered limb, which is so mad the way it has to be concocted, which is to take upwards of 20 live swallows. They have to be alive, so if you think of the logistics of capturing your first 20 live swallows you basically put them in a large earthenware pot bake them to a powder add some stuff some oils and herbs then you put the pot in the hottest dunghill you can find for a period of a couple of weeks then you slather it onto the withered limb so in the hope that it will kind of revivify right that is an unusual approach i mean you can't be that ill if you're able to catch 20 swallows but maybe someone else is doing it for you yeah and and um also by the time the thing has matured into being able to be used.

18:16Whatever was wrong with you either become fatal or got better, right? Anyway, explain why we shouldn't cast ridicule on people for engaging with this sort of thing. Right. So you mentioned whether they were effective. So first, we have to put ourselves in the 17th century mindset of how we understand something to work. To us, if we take a medicine and we get better it has worked to a 17th century person if they take the medicine and it has an effect it has worked so for example if they take a purge which is something they do to to violently dry you know i'd like to make themselves go to toilet bluntly the effect of the purge is whether it works whether it makes them go to toilet violently if they get better after that great but that's not it's not necessarily the fault of the medicine if it doesn't in quotes work secondly the important thing is often and this is the hardest thing for people to get the stuff that looks mad to our eyes makes perfect sense if we subscribe to the the model of the body that they do so a lot of the medicines that they use are to rebalance the humors to drive things out that are within them so that straight away explains bloodletting purges vomits and all the rest of them because the idea is if you've got something in you that's bad you get it out as quick as you can if you use as they do a vast array of animal products even animal waste products dung is a common ingredient even human dung in some cases not something we would use today but it's the belief that you are putting something into your body that was alive it has a vital spirit so it's re-energizing your body so that that between those two things it's the mindset they have to them it makes perfect sense and it is actually perfectly logical within the humoral system that the belief in the four humors so all of that there's almost nothing that cannot be used in medicine and there's almost nothing that they won't take if they believe it'll make them better okay i mean that does stack up then doesn't it and would would even those sort of university educated physicians would they be advocating these sorts of treatments or would they be proposing something which feels more modern and sort of scientific to us nope they do exactly the same so when queen anne was ill one of the things they used was the so-called pigeon cure which was to pull out the feathers of a live pigeon and hold the bear patch to the feet of the patient that could be used for the plague that was used on royalty was used on charles ii by his royal physicians.

20:55Everything that I've just mentioned there, the apparently in quotes weird stuff is used by physicians everywhere. Right. Now, when we started chatting, you said they took a carpet bombing approach to medicine. So how does that manifest? So it's kind of along the same idea, but you don't just take one medicine, you take many. You chuck everything you can at this in the hope that something sticks, basically. and i think in a way we have echoes of that so you know when we we have a headache if the paracetamols don't work we turn to the ibuprofen we might use one of these topical stick things that you can put on your forehead to make it better there's there's not just one approach it's the idea that you consult multiple opinions and you take whatever you can to make yourself feel better.

21:47Okay. So this is very much second opinion, second opinion doesn't work, third opinion and keep going. And then sooner or later, something's bound to pan out. Is that basically the lesson? Yes, it is. And I think there we start to see the life's lesson coming in a little bit here. It's about not just thinking, oh, I've tried that, it didn't work. We keep going. We don't just sit down and wait for this to take its course. We are proactive in trying to get better. Would you say that this kind of is a broader kind of lesson to take than just medicine? Could we expand that and say, like, basically, this is never give up generally in this, you know, in the spirit of Robert Bruce and the spider?

22:27Yeah, I absolutely think it is because they live, as you said earlier on, they live in a very, very dangerous period, you know, and yeah, medical historians are very loath to set this up as some sort of story of progress. Look how wonderful everything is now look how awful it was then but undoubtedly they are at the mercy of a whole barrage of fatal disfiguring just unpleasant conditions but they keep on i mean that's actually something else that's interesting to note you often see the average life expectancy of somebody in the 17th century being somewhere around about 40 but that's not correct that suggests that you get off you know you get to 40 and you think well i've had a good innings i'll just drop off the birch quietly now if you'd got to 40 you'd probably built up sufficient immunity to go on for a good you know perhaps another 20 or 30 years or more so the reason i bring that up is because it's easy to think that somebody who's 30 or 40 and gets some condition just thinks yeah like i just said it i've done okay i've got to this point but that's not the case they are always trying and i think that is a broader life's lesson this this idea that we shouldn't just give up things do get tough but there are multiple routes out.

23:40Ah okay that's nice that's a nice life lesson I see how you've got to that and I suppose also just going back to the medical side of things there's a sense of being willing to engage in a variety of approaches in a you've described as kind of holistic approach to medicine which kind of means something a bit different today perhaps but being willing to engage with lots of different ways that you might treat something. Yeah exactly I think holistic is a very good way of putting it and yes the meaning has changed but it is exactly that that they will try it's not necessarily they see one better than the other they just try lots of different ones obviously remedies that are in the family are considered more valuable because they're people of a similar constitution to you and if they've worked for them they'll probably work for you but there's no sort of suggestion that that they're moving up a scale it's a lateral thing they'll just try lots of different ones and i suppose one of the important things and this goes back to what you're talking about earlier about the way they understood medicine and the way they understood the body works is is actually believing in the treatment you're taking believing that it could be effective that's presumably quite an important aspect of uh of getting better yes and actually this returns to a point you mentioned earlier about when we if we think of early modern medicine as not being very scientific a colleague of mine mary frisell who works um is a professor in america made made a point at a conference years ago about this that said actually it's very scientific because if you look at the whole process of making the remedies it's all about precise weights and measurements it's all about like a cookery recipe everything has to be done properly and so i would say what they're adopting is a trial and error approach and what's that if not a scientific approach it's trying and testing lots of different things and measuring the outcome yeah okay that's an interesting take yeah but just i suppose the whole process being conducted in a slightly different mental ecosystem to what we have today yeah i mean and it could go to scary lengths because i actually remember when i was working on my material on whales coming across a guy in north wales who in the 17th century kind of treated his body like a little bit of an experiment and he would concoct his own medicines and distill lots of different things chemicals and such and in one note i remember he was making his own purge so you know like one of these things that stop you being constipated you know those kind of things to loosen you up for want of a better term but he tried a couple and there was one terrifying note next to one of them that said this proved too hot for me and i think in that sentence it's probably a very uncomfortable afternoon god yeah okay well let's let's go no further on that one okay so alan wrap up so do you want to kind of summarize what you've been saying what's what's the life lesson what should we be taking today from from this from your researches into the way people in the 17th century century approached illness and medicine?

26:28I think it can be quite succinctly as never give up. I think like that, they had it in many ways a lot worse than we have. We have approaches and treatments that they had no access to and no idea about. And yet they keep going through not just the medical side, they had very hard lives and yet live very full lives often. And you see that in the records that we have, you know, and I think that things get bad throughout our lives, but just having that little bit of hope that little bit of knowledge that you know the world turns and days go by and that things do and can get better and i think that is a something i've often found when i've looked back at people who are leaving records when they're in great pain or they're desperate in fact they have things wrong with them that they maybe don't believe yet can be cured but they don't give up and they keep going and this is where i get personal on you you're a self-professed hypochondriac, you've said earlier that you immediately think the worst.

27:26So do you ever sort of employ this mentality yourself? Is this a life hack that you adhere to? It's a life hack that I try to adhere to. Let's say that. I wish I could live my life as some sort of wellness guru, you know, professing to have the answers to all this. But it's something I think if I don't yet do it, then I'm keen to do it. okay brilliant now before we finish i did say we should talk about beards a bit um this i'm dropping you on this so you haven't had a chance to think about it uh i'm trying to grow a beard right now it's not coming on terribly well what would uh what would uh an early modern beard expert advised to me to get a nice full beard oh well that's a good one there i mean i i could employ the never give up analogy again there couldn't i but um i think you know you provided have you had a beard before?

28:15I've never had a beard, no. Right, well, you need to give it time. They grow at different speeds for different people. But if it turns out that you might be one of these people who can't grow a fulsome crop, then there were products in the 18th century you could try various preparations that claimed to give you a full crop of whiskers in a matter of days. Or if you want to try it the other way, there are plenty of good false beards on the market.

28:43i'm not sure how to take that i think maybe you're very impressed by my efforts so far so it's a work in progress right alan thank you very much that's been a tremendous chat so we've got a good life lesson there never give up it's been a fun chatting to you dr alan withy senior lecturer in history at the university of exeter and we should all look out for your forthcoming research on the history of travel, right? Yeah, the new article just coming out about the history of motion sickness in carriages, 18th century carriages. So yes. Okay, probably some good life lessons there as well. So Alan, thank you very much for your time.

29:19Pleasure. Thanks, Dave. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do let me know what you think and do check out my sub stack at historyextralifelessons.substack.com and let me know at lifelessonsathistoryextra.com if you have any comments on this life lesson, whether you employ the advice in your day-to-day, and if you have an idea for a future life lesson from history that I could investigate.

30:21Have you heard that McDonald's spicy chicken McNuggets made with spicy tempura and a blend of aged cayenne are back? Remember to grab a few extra napkins. for a limited time at participating McDonald's. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.

31:061-800-CONTACTS