Renaissance Medicine: healthcare and disease in early modern England

23:03Well, before Elizabeth died and then James took over England is how I like to phrase it. And so there was a really strong medical connection between Italy and Scotland. So you see that more in the Scottish plague. That's interesting. You did in England. But yeah, England, it's a slight bit of a misnomer in England, isn't it? It's very rare. So social distancing, obviously the Italians have quarantine, which is where we get the word from, which is where you have 40 days of isolation. And we get some pretty wild cures. There's a guy called George Thompson. Yeah, George Thompson's great. He claims that he survived the plague four times, which would be amazing.

23:41But possible. But, yeah, technically possible. And they think now some people had a genetic mutation, which makes them a bit more likely to survive. But anyway, he's a physician, but he stays in London when a load of the other physicians have left. And he's very interested in the plague. He anatomises his neighbour's manservant who's died of the plague. And then, surprisingly, he gets the plague again. But he's got a few different cures. So he says if you can carry gemstones about your person, they might somehow draw out the plague. Oh, OK. Yeah, or the dissolved flesh of snakes. That's also good.

24:17That's good for later things. Gem Z are still doing that today. Yeah, yeah. You know that. Carrying crystals. Carrying crystals. Oh, wow. Well, if you can't afford gemstones, you can do an alternative which I haven't seen on TikTok which is you get a toad and you stare at the toad really hard for about 15 minutes and there's this theory that toads really hate humans and that the toad will be so pissed off by you staring at it that it will die and then you can like dry out the toad and you can make it into pills or you can just hang it around your neck and because of the badness that's then in the toad it's like concentrated rage that's inside the toad, it kind of draws out the plague.

24:57Amazing. I see the movie now, The Men Who Stare at Toads. I mean, it's a very short movie. And it's definitely a weird ending to Wind in the Willows, isn't it? Where Toad just gets sort of stared at and dies and then is powdered. So we've got amphibian-based plague cures where you get a furious toad that dies of sheer rage and then you powder it. Fine. Dissolved snakes and emeralds on gemstones. Fabulous. That's George Thompson. We do have scientific progress. You talked about anatomy, which is where someone is opening up the body to look for evidence of disease. We do have a very famous anatomist, William Harvey, who does some proper science.

25:32Yes, he is a clever chap. Before this point, you talked about Galen and blood. And the Galenic theory of blood is that you make blood mostly in your liver and then the heart adds oxygen into the blood. and then it kind of goes around the body, but it sort of just sloshes around the body. William Harvey, he measured how much blood you could pump out of the heart and he worked out for that to be true, you'd have to be making enormous quantities of blood from your liver every day, like multiples of what you weigh. So he's like, okay, that can't be true. So he gets ligatures and he puts them around people's arms.

26:09So he ties off their arms. Yeah. And then he looks at what happens to the arm. And if you have the ligature really tight, the arm will go cold. Yeah. But if you have the ligature a bit looser, the arm will go hot and fat because the arteries are further down in the body than the veins. So from there, and using various weird experiments on animals, he works out that the blood does in fact go round and round the body. So this is the circulatory system. He figures out that the heart pumps blood around the body. It's not completely like we would understand it now, but he's pretty close. Sure, he gets the principle of it.

26:44And this is a major revolution in the history of medicine, which is important. And to a certain extent, he's doing that because he's got a lot of bodies around because of the English Civil War, right? There's violence, there's wars, there's battles, there's dead bodies everywhere. So he's sort of going, all right, I've seen some bodies. So are we post-1665 now? Well, just before. Yeah, just before, I think, a little bit before. Yeah, I think it was 1640s and 50s, I think. The other person we need to talk about, Christopher Wren. Ria, do you know the name Christopher Wren? Yes, but not in the context of medicine.

27:10Oh, that was his first great love. Was that his first grade book? And he just turned himself... He dabbled in cathedrals. He dabbled in cathedrals, did he? Yeah, I could do you a cathedral. But no, he's a doctor. So he is, you know... Isn't that disgusting? You just like stick to your lane, all right? Some of us have one lane and we barely fill it. That's not true. You're a comedian, virologist, a musician. You've got all sorts of lanes. Come on. Okay, all right. I'm trying to speak for the everyman here. You know, I'm a podcaster. I'm a wrestler. I'm a, you know... No, he's a doctor and an architect.

27:42and he's a scientist and he's part of the Royal Society. He's doing blood transfusion research. Yeah, I love the blood transfusions they do at this time because they're just wild. Christopher Wren works out that you can basically transfuse various substances into people's veins using a quill and like a sheep's bladder or something. And I've seen the bit of apparatus that he makes in a museum. It is incredible that they ever managed to get anything into people's bodies. But anyway, he starts putting various things in. He's like, what happens if you give them opium or wine? You know, these various things.

28:18Who is he doing this on? Not volunteers, surely. Volunteers is a strong word. Patients he'd found, I guess. Yeah, and dogs. And dogs and animals, isn't it? Okay, all right. He has problems because the dogs keep running away, as you might expect. So he's, I mean, there's a physician called Richard Lauer, or Lauer maybe, who's performed the first dog blood transfusion. You'd hope the only, but the first. Oh, yeah, not the only. Once you've got a way of getting blood into an animal, then they're really keen to see what happens if you put blood from different animals into each other. Right. There's like a moment where they say, maybe we could put blood into people who've lost a lot of blood.

29:02But they almost immediately dismiss that idea and instead go down the avenue of what happens if I put the blood of a timid dog into a fierce dog does it make that dog more tame? Oh, interesting. Yeah, or if I put a greyhound's blood into my basset hound, will it then run really fast? Robert Boyle's involved in a lot of this. This is basically Captain America science, isn't it? How do I supercharge a nerd, a dweeb, and make him super strong? Yeah, basically. From the beginning when they start doing it, you can see where it's going, which is that they want to do it on a human. Yeah. And they eventually manage to get hold of this human.

29:33They first go to Bedlam, but the keeper of Bedlam, actually to his credit, says, no, you can't just have one of my patients. So this is a hospital for people who are mentally unwell. It's Bethlehem, but we mostly call it Bedlam now. So they get this other guy and they put the blood of a sheep into him because the guy is supposedly mad. Where did we get this guy, if not from Bedlam? They pay him. Oh, OK. Yeah, sure. He's supposedly a bit mad, but mostly I think he just needs money. OK. So they give him, I think they give him maybe like 30 shillings. I have not heard of, oh, I guess he couldn't really just do a sperm donation to a bank.

30:09No. That's how they do it now. No blood donors, yeah. No, okay. They put this blood of a sheep into him thinking like the sheep is nice and quiet and it kind of works. He says afterwards, oh, yeah, I feel great because he basically wants to get paid again and have them do it again. But at the same time, there's scientists in France doing the same thing with another guy, but they're putting calf's blood in. and after a while that man dies and then it's zip. They then realise, hang on a second, this isn't working. Okay, so we can, I think if you're putting sheep blood into people, we can call that bad medicine.

30:43There you go, thanks to you. Only you can do that joke. All right, well, I've got another one now. Let's move on from the bar, let's go for the bar bars to the barbers. Because we're going to talk about the barber surgeons. Ria, care to guess what a barber surgeon was and the clues in the name? Basically, I remember that you needed to have big hands. And I don't know why barbers had to have big hands, but I knew that to be a surgeon you had to have big hands because you wanted to be able to grip. Like later in the 1800s, you wanted big hands to play Rachmaninoff, but in this time you wanted big hands to be able to grip the arteries on both sides of the thigh with one hand so that you could stem the bleeding while you sawed off the leg.

31:23Was hair particularly coarse back then? Yeah, it's a good question. I've had expensive haircuts, but this could cost you an arm and a leg, literally, right? Oh, they're just flowing. I'm loving it. It starts off with the barbers, and for ages they're called the Company of Barber Surgeons because the barbers back in medieval times... They sung lovely songs, didn't they? Can you imagine? Four-part harmonies while sawing away. While screaming. So the barbers, they are pretty handy with a razor, and the monks that were doing most of the medicine back in the medieval period are not actually supposed to spill blood.

32:00So they get the barbers in to do things like that. Oh, but beer was okay. Wow, the standards, the double standards. And then eventually some of the barbers, they're pretty much just working as surgeons and they decide, okay, we should formalize this. And they get the company of barber surgeons in 1534. So there's this picture of Henry VIII handing over a charter to this company while the physicians stand on his other side looking like they've swallowed a bee. and then they decide okay now we've kind of divvied it up the surgeons are going to do the surgery and the barbers are going to cut their hair and never the twain shall meet and then of course they are doing some surgeries of a sort i mean the blood the blood letting is surgery right it's you know they're doing lots of surgeries we always think that they're either letting blood or they're hacking someone's leg off that is already kind of dangling off but actually they do a lot of amputations but they also do operations for kidney and bladder stones they They do mastectomies.

32:58Oh, really? Yeah. It's horrible. I mean, hernias, fistulas, cataracts. So external surgeries, I suppose. Yeah, quite a lot of cataracts. Oh, cataracts. Oh, no, we know what that is. Oh, no. Oh, they're just plucking that out, aren't they? And Kittley stones, bladder stones must be agonising because there's no pain relief. No, it's bad. And obviously the 16th and 17th century in England is a time of war, of battles, of civil wars in the 17th century, of course. So you've got loads and loads of people going to war and horrible injuries. So this is also a time of prosthesis, of fake false legs, of false eyes, of false noses, ears stitched to hats, which I love.

33:34So you put the hat down and suddenly you've got ears attached, which is amazing. We should bring those back. Look, I'm an elf. But we need to move on to a different discipline, which is the apocryphary. I mean, I don't know if I pronounce that correctly, but these are pharmacists? Yeah, basically. So they come from the pepperers and the spices who are medieval. OK. Because... Did you say those two words again? Pepperers and spices. I'd love to be like pepperers. They import pepper and spices. Oh, wow. Yeah. Pepperers and spices. Yeah, and they basically have pharmacists. What they're supposed to do is fill the prescriptions that the physicians write.

34:05What they actually do is they do that, but they also sell their own medicines and they do a bit of their own medical practice. So they diagnose, they sell, they've got their own little shops maybe. Yeah, there's loads of them. Yeah, and there's loads of them in London, isn't there? We know it's like one for every 2 ,000 people. And this is a big city. Yeah. So there's a lot of apothecaries. Apothecaries? How are we pronouncing it? Apothecary. Apothecary. It's quite hard to say. And when the physicians do a runner during the plague, the apothecaries stay, right? Yes, most of them stay. And sometimes they're actually filling in for the physicians at the hospitals.

34:36Tremendously brave. Yeah, they are brave. I think they're more embedded in their communities than the physicians are. And the most famous one, I suppose, would be Nicholas Culpepper, who is amazing, does work with the poor, often does incredibly sort of, you know, really generous work, and also writes one of the most popular medicine books of all time. Yeah, it's still in print. It's had more editions than Grey's Anatomy. Wow. Wait, what's it called? I'm buying it. Culpepper's Herbal. Culpepper's Herbal. Culpepper's Herbal. Yeah, he's a sort of huge name and he's a sort of good guy. He's doing community work and, you know, during the plague and everything.

35:05Amazing. So, yes, we could see him doing sort of sarcastic commentaries on, you know, TikTok videos now these days. Okay, dumb question. But was he called Culpepper coincidentally and he becomes an apothecary? or does he come from a long line of pepperers? No, he's from a long line of vicars. Oh, really? Of vicars. But he's like, my name is Culpepper. I must pepper. I must, the clue is in the name. Brilliant. I mean, it was like, yeah, I mean, talk about calling. Nominative determinism. Yeah. Okay. So we've discussed legit medical professionals. We've got physicians, apothecaries. We've got, you know, barber surgeons, but we've also got some slightly dodgier quacks.

35:40I'm going to use the word quack. Ria, what do you think the stroker did as a service? Okay. This is a family show. So not that. The stroker. The stroker. What can you stroke? Okay. So far. Okay. I think the stroker, I keep thinking too far forward into the 1800s. And there were a lot of things that doctors did for women that could come under the stroking umbrella, but we're not there yet. So does the stroker do some kind of something that calms the nervous system like literally stroking? and they don't realise that that's what they're doing by calming people down? It's a good guess and very, very elegantly put.

36:21Well done for Radio 4. Alana, who is the stroker and what does he do? So the stroker is a guy called Valentine Great Rakes. What a name. I know. I mean, you start with a good name and then you get an even better nickname. He is Irish. He's essentially a faith healer and he comes over from Ireland in 1665 and the way he treats people is that, say you've got a headache, He'll start, he'll kind of stroke your head and then he'll stroke like maybe down to your fingertips and the headache comes out at your fingertips. Oh. Yeah, he's incredibly popular. He calms your nervous system then. Oh my gosh.

36:57So it's sort of massage or is it just sort of, it's more... Just sort of feathery stroking. Feathery stroking. It's Irish Reiki. Does he also speak in his Irish accent? Because I'll be honest, if I had a migraine and someone just talked to me in that beautiful lilt, I think it would go as well. Yeah, maybe. I mean, presumably he is Irish, so... And we would call him a quack. What does quack mean in a historical term? The word quack comes from the word quacksalver, which is a Dutch word for somebody who sells ointments by boasting about their medical credentials. Right, OK. So someone with a bit of kind of, a little bit of showmanship, razzmatazz.

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38:07So we've got male surgeons, male physicians, male quacks, But Ria, you brought up women earlier, which I think was a really sort of notable point. And I think, Alana, we need to talk about the fact that women were hugely involved in healthcare. I suspect they were hugely involved in Culpeper's herbal. Maybe. Yeah, I mean, a lot of what Culpeper puts in the herbal, he's just cribbed from women. Okay. We always talk about the physicians and the surgeons and stuff because they're the ones that left a lot of writings. But the vast majority of medical treatment is being administered by women, kind of noble women or women of the kind of middling class who give medicines to their servants and their families and their neighbours.

38:47And they do extraordinary medicine. They do all the kind of basically giving you a hot toddy type medicine. But they also, some of them will do bits of surgery, like treat quite serious illnesses. The noble women will do this. That's fascinating. Not like in my picture in my head, I picture the noble woman living in a manor, but then it's going to be like the village herbalist that comes in and does all the midwifery. But you're saying it's actually... The noble women, they've got money and they're board witness. And they're clever and they're quite well educated. Yeah, exactly. Oh, amazing. So actually, you know, in a local village, you've got your squire who's got some land and everything else and it might be his wife that is the nurse of the town.

39:31Yeah. Wow. And one of the most famous women of this era would be Hannah Woolley. Yeah. Hannah Woolley is kind of like Martha Stewart or someone like that. So she's not noble. She pulls herself up basically by her bootstraps. Her husband dies and she needs to make some money. So she does one of the first commercial remedy books. And it's really, really popular. And she ends up publishing loads of these. So it's her and Culpepper, the best-selling medical books of the time, I suppose. Yeah. And a lot of... There's not really copyright in this period. So a lot of the medicines... There's not copyright now, is there?

40:05AI companies, boo. Anyway, sorry. A lot of the medicines appear across numerous examples. Okay. Ria, important question. What was cock water? Okay, because this is a family-friendly radio show, I'm going to assume you're spelling cock, C-A-U-L-K. Oh, beautiful. And it's mineral water or something chalky. No, it's spelled C-O-C-K. Is it? It's spelled cock water. I tried to lift this programme up out of the gutter and you keep bringing it back down. You're a classy lady and I've dragged it down again. Alana, what is cock water? Cock water is a cure-all medicine for fevers and things. You make it by mashing up a cockerel and then you distill the water from the cockerel with raisins, the milk of a red cow and ambergris.

40:56And ambergris is whale phlegm, right? It is. Yeah, hyper expensive, incredibly expensive. Hard to find. Hard to find because you need a whale to literally wash up on the beach. Sometimes just the ambergris will wash up on the beach. Oh, beautiful. Yeah, and it's for fevers and things. Okay. Oh, so it's like cow poll. Kind of. It sounds like chicken soup. It's cream of chicken soup. Let's be honest. I mean, we've all been fed that when we were ill. Sure. And it makes us feel better. Sorry. It was a cow as red as milk, a chicken as red as blood. What was the recipe? Chicken. Chicken. Milk from a red cow.

41:31Yeah. Raisins. Ambergris Yeah An ambergris Another one of course I'm sorry There's other stuff in it as well You know I'm sorry I know that we say raisins And we go Sure raisins Yeah you know We all think Oh that lovely California tree In the little red box But We're talking 1600s here Where these grapes Grapes are still in Italy Aren't they? They're shipped in They're shipped in They're dried raisins So you can transport them Shipping them in You're shipping them in I'm not giving them enough credit The other cures of course Would be oil of frog Oil of frog Oil of frog Oil of frog And puppy water, I don't want to ask.

42:03Puppy water can either be puppy wee or water in which you've boiled a puppy. Oh, come on. No. Come on. All right. Well, as a BBC programme, I once again must stress, please do not go around boiling frogs or puppies. Right. Moving on. We've mentioned midwives very briefly. Alana, this is a hugely important part of healthcare and medicine. Does the midwifery world have a college? Are they official physicians? Are they treated that way? What is their training? Midwifery is a funny profession because some of the midwives are professional midwives. They're making all their money from it. They do a lot of births.

42:42And some of the midwives are like your auntie that has seven kids. So there's always mostly men trying to get them to make it more formal, but they're quite resistant to it. And the most famous one, I suppose, from this era would be Jane Sharp. Yeah, Jane Sharp's great. We hardly know anything about her as a person. She's kind of mysterious, but she writes this big midwifery book. It's like 400 pages, but it's really good seller. And it's very frank about everything, which I think is why people bought it. It's also got really detailed pictures of all the different sort of presentations that can go wrong.

43:17So the baby's got his arm stuck the wrong way. Breach birth and that sort of thing. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating read. And I suppose we should talk a little bit about general beliefs about women's bodies in this era. so in the 16th, 17th century. Ria, a mini quiz for you. Which of these was not believed at the time? So, number one, unborn babies would breathe through the woman's vagina. Two, the womb could move around inside a woman's body and had to be coaxed back into place with delicious smells. Three, babies with longer umbilical cords had longer penises. Or four, the womb continued to live after a woman had died.

43:52Which of those not true? I'm going to go with number three umbilical cord and penis length because you could just eyeball that because I know the the womb traveling around your body that was a thing they're just like come back come back come back down and we kind of like soothe it back into place the breathing through the vagina kind of makes logical sense if you know nothing about the inside and what was the last one again the last one was that the womb continues to live yeah and that one I'm gonna say I still think some people in the US believe because they do not see us as people. They see us as walking incubators.

44:25So I'm going to go with number three. I mean, you're correct to go for three as one that might seem outlandish. They're all true. I lied to you. Can I just say all of the men I date have incredibly long umbilical cords? Still now. That's weird. Science, science, isn't it? I can't argue with a fact. Okay, well, sorry for lying to you there, Ria, obviously, you know, you trusted me and I betrayed you, but, you know, a comedy show, so what are you going to do? You're a man. So, Alana, midwives, were they allowed to practice in peace, or, as Ria had sort of suggested earlier, did men sort of go, this is a job for a man, this is my field of medicine?

45:04Do we get a sense here of male medicine muscling in on midwifery? Yeah. The worst offenders are this family called the Chamberlains that I mentioned earlier. they get very into midwifery but people aren't really that interested because the women are doing a perfectly good job of it but they have this thing that they call the secret and they won't tell anyone what it is obviously because they want to sell it and they turn up to birth they take like a big box in they'll be in the birthing chamber blindfold the woman ring bells and stuff they want everyone to think that they have this massive piece of machinery um actually once they kind of give up on the whole project after about 100 years, it turns out what they have is the forceps.

45:46Oh, right. Yeah. On the one hand... I'm so angry right now. I wondered whether we would get into the number of bits of machinery that men invented for childcare purposes. And the depths of depravity, it's angering. It really is. So one family controlled the forcep industry? Yep. And then eventually they found them under the floorboards of this guy's house. He buried them there to keep them safe. It's a family secret. Oh, goodness me. So men sort of muscled in and invented new technology or so on. And midwifery itself. We haven't really changed the design of forceps. No. So I've had a forcep delivery.

46:26My first kid was a forcep delivery. And it really is about treating the woman as meat in order to get the baby out. and the damage that's done to the woman because of the design of forceps is horrific in a lot of situations and it's because it was designed by people for other people. So the people who designed it were never going to be the recipients of it. Well, I'm sorry you had experience. No, no. Kid's great. So I kept the kid. Sure. Love the kid. Good. Glad to hear that. But yeah, absolutely. Alana, obviously the Chamberlain family with their forceps, what came before that? Before that, if the baby got really stuck, there was basically nothing you could do.

47:10And if you got to the point where you thought that the baby had died in the mother, the surgeon would be called in and they would use various horrible instruments, including a kind of great big hook to extract it from the woman. Midwives, were they ever regulated? I mean, of course they're regulated now, of course they are. But were they in the historical period, talking about the 16th century, 17th century? Yeah, there's physicians and the surgeons they really wanted to regulate them and they kept trying to do it but basically they never succeeded um it wasn't actually legally required for midwives to have training until 1902 wow yeah after queen victoria yeah goodness me extraordinary um okay so the company of surgeons company of the company of physicians was 1518 and 1902 for the company of midwives.

47:56Yeah. Wow. Okay. Ria, we've been on quite a journey. I think that's a testament to how much you can trust women. It's the fact that it wasn't until men muscled their way in that we finally went, okay, we should regulate this. But when women did it by themselves, we were like, they're fine. They're fine. People are being born. People are standing up afterwards and walking around after childbirth. There's no need to regulate this. Then the Chamberlains come in and they went, oh, no, maybe we should. Maybe, maybe we should regulate. It's quite the story though, isn't it? The history of medicine in this period, Ria It's incredible Who would you have trusted with your healthcare in this period if you were there back then?

48:32Would you have gone with the physicians? Oh, I'm going with Jane Sharp Yeah, probably wise Jane Sharp Who knows what a breech birth looks like I'm like, I trust you Maybe the noble woman in the area as well Yeah, Hannah Woolley Hannah Woolley wasn't noble No, she wasn't But I'll trust Hannah Woolley too Okay, fair enough But you're not going with the Chamberlains I'm very much not going with the Chamberlains The Nuance Window

48:57OK, it's time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Ria and I sit quietly, mixing our herbal cures for two minutes while Dr Alana takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about Renaissance medicine in England. My stopwatch is ready, so take it away, Dr Alana. Can I just get a cup of hot urine while we listen? You may, you may. OK, Alana, you've got two minutes. Off you go. OK, so there's this big emphasis on the market and this is what I usually talk about is that commercialisation is driving medical specialism and driving people to get better at medicine. But we also have to remember that this is the birth of a lot of the public health that we now know.

49:35So we've seen the plague and you have public health measures there. But we also have things like welfare. Because after the dissolution of the monasteries, the monasteries who've been looking after people, they can't do that anymore. and there's kind of chaos for about 70 years and then Elizabeth as in Elizabeth I recognizes that she needs to bring in an act for the welfare of maimed soldiers because there's so many wars there are so many people with disabilities coming home and that act gets tinkered with over the next 300 years it's basically the origins of the welfare system the other thing we have is hospitals and that's again driven by war because the civil wars you need hospitals for people it's a whole propaganda thing of who has the best hospitals so you get more hospitals being used as training centers and more hospitals in general so at the end of the 17th century you get new hospitals or expansions of hospitals like Chelsea, St Thomas, Guise, Westminster they're all produced during that period.

50:39So we have quite a lot of hangover from that time in the good as well as the horrible stuff that we always think about. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Wow. I forgot that about the monks. The monks were the welfare system. You know, if you were tired, they would take in the poor and they would feed them up, send them on their way. So when Henry got rid of them, we lost basically our mental health support network. Yeah, he completely dismantled the health system. Yes, just so he could marry a lady he then executed. Classic Henry. Yes, I mean, the dissolution of the monasteries, listener, if you don't know, is Henry VIII switching the faith of England from Catholicism to his own personal religion, the Church of England, where he's in charge, and taking all the land and all the monasteries.

51:25So thank you so much, Alana. That's fascinating. So healthcare sort of returned under Elizabeth I. She went, actually, we need these institutions. Yeah, I mean, healthcare's a strong word. Okay. But kind of not throwing rocks at the disabled. I've got an idea for a policy. Instead of throwing rocks at the disabled. Yeah. If they go back to their home parish, the home parish now has to do something to try and take care of them. Gotcha. Okay. Oh, so that just became a law? Yeah. Oh. So were home parishes literally kicking out their disabled and going, go to the next parish? Yeah, that's where we get passports from because it's the pass that lets you get through the porch and then like through the country and back to your home village or whatever, because otherwise being a vagrant was illegal.

52:09Wow. Huh. So what do you know now?

52:16Well, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Dr Ria to see how much she has learned. Ria, you seem to have known quite a lot coming into this. We've had a lovely chat. We have. This has been amazing. And you're good at these quizzes typically. Well, we'll see. We covered a lot of ground today. You've got a lot of notes there. How many pages are we looking? One, two, three, four, five, six, six. This is so much better than my students. We've got ten questions for you. Okay. Let's see how you do. So, question one. What professional medical body was founded in 1518?

52:50The Royal College of Physicians. It was. Well done. Number two. Name one diagnostic test a physician might carry out on a patient. Just the one. Okay, they might test your urine by sniffing it or drinking it. Quaffing it. Quaffing. They might quaff. A cup of coffee, yeah. Question three. Which animal's blood did Richard Lower transfuse into a human volunteer in 1667? A dog. It was a sheep, actually. It was a sheep, yeah. Oh, no, you're right. Sorry. Richard Lower did the first dog blood transfusion, but put sheep blood into his non-bedroom volunteer. Paid volunteer, yes. Whereas in France, they did it with calfs.

53:32Yes. I'll give you half a point there because that's some good knowledge, but you can get the answer straight away. Question four. Which group performed the majority of medical care in Renaissance England? The majority? When I say group, which gender? Oh, men. Well, hang on a second. We started way back at the beginning with all physicians are doctors, but not all doctors are physicians. That's right. My answer would have been doctors, but we didn't cover women really till the end, and then we covered them very specifically as midwives. That's a fair point. Publicaries also, as you said, there were like 1 ,000 to 2 ,000, so there's multiple answers to this question.

54:08I'm going to give you a point for that because that's a fair critique of our system. You've undermined the question writing, so I'll give you the point. Question five. What was the nickname of the Irish quack doctor Valentine Great Rakes who captured the English attention in 1666? The stroker. I don't know what accent that was. I'm sorry, I tried to do Irish and I failed. That was more Bram Stoker. Yeah, I apologise to all of Ireland. The stroker. Question six. What was cock water?

54:37Not what I said it was. It was basically cream of chicken soup. You had to put some cock in there, as in chicken. Yeah. And then milk from a red cow, some raisins. Yeah, a bit of ambergris. Yeah, absolutely. A bit of ambergris. Yeah, very good. If you could get your hands on it. Yeah. Question seven. Can you name two types of surgery that were performed in Renaissance England? Well, there was bloodletting. Yes. If we count that as a surgery, very minor surgery. Sure. Bloodletting. And shall we go with bladder stone removal? Yeah, let's... For Samuel Peet. Because it's absolutely horrifying, isn't it?

55:07Yes, he could have had fractures. But he survived. He did. Mastectomies too, hernias, fistulas, amputations, all sorts of horrible, horrible stuff. Question eight. Who was Hannah Woolley? Oh, Hannah Woolley was not noble. No. But she did end up writing a commercial remedy book, which probably overlapped a lot with Culpepper's book. Very good. Question nine. What strange belief did people have about wombs in Renaissance England? Oh, so many. So many weird things. One, that the womb travelled around the body. Which probably was a precursor to women being hysterical in the 1800s. If they were hysterical, your womb was too high in your body.

55:44That's where the word comes from. Hystera, yeah. Also that it lived beyond the woman. That's very good. Very good. Excellent. And this for nine and a half out of ten. which 17th century book written by a public-spirited apothecary is perhaps the most popular medical text of all time? Culpeper's Herbal. Nine and a half out of ten. Very good. I'm annoyed about that dog one. Well, I mean, I think you did very well. I think you did really well because you got, you know, dog was correct. It wasn't into the patient. It wasn't into the patient. It was the first dog transfusion. Yeah, but I mean, very, very impressive.

56:14You wouldn't put it past them. No. Thank you so much, Ria. And listener, if you want more from Ria, check out our episodes on Chung Yi Cao, the amazing pirate queen, the most successful pirate of all time. And, of course, our episode on Marco Polo. And for more on the history of health and wellness, we have episodes on ancient medicine, Renaissance beauty in Italy and the Kellogg brothers. They were fun. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

56:47But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the amazing Dr. Alana Skous from the University of Reading. Thank you, Alana. Thank you. Pleasure to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, we have the brilliant Ria Lina. Dr. Ria Lina. Thank you, Ria. Pleasure, as always. See me afterwards for that round. Oh, thank you. Puppy water, is it? Oh, no. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we restore another languishing historical topic back to full health. But for now, I'm off to go and launch my new wellness brand, Leeches for Life. I'm going to be rich.

57:17Bye.

57:20You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4. This episode was researched by Catherine Russell. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagus and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagus. And our executive editor was Philip Sellers.

57:45Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast-to-podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to, or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts, and panel shows, including my own show, Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast.

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