"In 1519, Captain Hernán Cortés landed in Veracruz to begin his great conquest. Upon arriving, he gave the order to his men to burn the ships. As I imagine it, someone then laughed and Cortés promptly thrust his sword into the man's chest. After which, the rest proceeded to get hammered on rum by the glow of the blaze." That the real life example where this expression started...
Wikipedia disagrees. Same outcome, different method:
> Men still loyal to the governor of Cuba planned to seize a ship and escape to Cuba, but Cortés moved swiftly to squash their plans. Two leaders were condemned to be hanged; two were lashed, and one had his foot mutilated. To make sure such a mutiny did not happen again, he decided to scuttle his ships.
> There is a popular misconception that the ships were burned rather than sunk. This misconception has been attributed to the reference made by Cervantes de Salazár in 1546, as to Cortés burning his ships. This may have also come from a mis-translation of the version of the story written in Latin.
>Take cudweed and boil it in fine ale, and drink it first thing in the morning and last thing at night; and make the patient a bed in a pile of steaming horse dung, and lay him in it.
Sleeping in a pile of horse sh*t... I don't see any hygenic problem with that, let alone the smell...
London, and other towns and cities, had a bit of a shit problem in the 1300s. Streets full of horse and human shit, households throwing their waste into the streets and/or river or if lucky selling it to a nearby cloth dyer, water dangerous to drink so best stick to beer or wine, the serious health risk from floors covered in rushes. OK, if you were posh enough there was a chute from the privvy straight into the moat or river. Oh and the river was where the leftovers from the slaughter houses went.
I think it's fair to say that smell and hygiene expectation was a little different in the middle ages. Cured, if wealthy enough, with a pomander - a ball full of nicely smelly herbs and oils that you carried as portable gas mask.
From Health A millennium of health improvement (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm)
The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.
From this history.stackexchange[1] thread, on user found that the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years in England.
In the same thread it seem that it was 48.5 depending on how you made your calculation and 53.4 years if you made it to 20 year old.
[1] -https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...
You don't get infection or disease because.
1- most of the people (and probably you too) are vaccinated and prevent the spreading of such disease.
2- Most of our current developed world is sanitize compare to back them
3- a cut could be lethal or could meant amputation in the middle age, now you just need to put alchool on it.
4- you might had suffer from malnutrition even has a monarch, lack of vitamin C could lead to scurvy in the winter and lack of iodine in the food might cause Iodine deficiency (wich lead to Goitre or Cretinism)
If you your so keen of wanting to live that life style, you can find a sweet amish girl and go live in her community.
I can't help but feel that there is some mild trolling going on this thread :-) If not that, there are at least a couple of people who are seriously optimistic about their personal invulnerability in the absence of modern medicine, healthcare, and public health practices.
I think that things like herd immunity just aren't intuitively understood or respected by the people who think that just because they haven't had a health emergency in the modern world they haven't benefitted from their existence in the modern world.
Women in Pictish society were regarded as the equal of men and succession in leadership (later kingship) was matrilineal (through the mother's side), with the reigning chief succeeded by either his brother or perhaps a nephew but not through patrilineal succession of father to son. [0]
