Of the Pox and Mercury

[Bos'n Cross]

wow...i am so glad the medicine hath improved.....id hate to think what those "corrupt humors" might have been....eehh........ THANK YOU mark!...i hope someone can shed light on this, if you talk to fred, i believe he was near by when someone mentioned it.....they were having a rousing good time at my poxy expense.....

[Mission]

You haven't paid attention to my presentation, have you?

Ancient medical theory - from Hippocrates (and before) to about 1900 - believed that our body contained 4 humors. (Hippocrates is one of the first people we know of to have codified the basics of humoral theory.) These four humors consisted of phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile. If you became ill or had medical problems it was believed that the illness proceeded in part from these four humors being out of balance. This is the reason they bled people when they were sick. They were trying to remove the bad blood and balance the humors. (Well, among other things. There was a whole extensive theory woven around the idea of humors that goes beyond this discussion.) Additionally, when you were wounded, there was a need to balance the humors and draw them away from the wound. So they might bleed your big toe to draw humors away from a problem in your neck (This is something I was just yesterday reading Matthias Purmann did in one case.)

So there's the basics of humoral theory for you in a nutshell. It wasn't until the late 19th century that it fell out of favor, so much of the medical theory that governed recorded human history was based on this theory.

Now, to point. When Clowes says, "A great and inordinate amount of flux of vicious and corrupt humors passed out of his mouth, with much acrimony, burning heat and sharpness, by reason of the putrefaction of his gums..." he is stating that some sort of fluid or fluid-based stuff came from the poor guy's mouth. He blames it on humors coming from the guy's rotting gums. (Curiously, rotting gums is actually one of the symptoms of scurvy, among other things.)

We hope you have enjoyed this brief overview. For more information on humoral theory, visit your local library. Or be lazy and look it up on wiki.

[sutlerjon]

So who gets to beat the colorful biles, phlegm, and blood outta Cross for engaging in the behavior that makes him (and us) sick?

Whoever does it, please give him a rap on the knuckles for me ....

So, let me see if I got this right, it is possible that some VD's came from shepherds "tending" their flock .... but to get rid of it you would wrap a freshly killed chicken around your ?!?

Seems like a boy named Portnoy was complainin' bout the liver a few years ago, maybe he shoulda had the chicken.

Talk about a "humorous" subject .... my mom always said it was wrong to laugh at others' medical misfortunes ....

At this point Capt. Sterling may wanna lose a bosun, before the Archangels are "corrupted" or "infected". Don't slip on the slobber covered deck ...... or ..... when Cross is around keep a few buckets of sand handy.

As I've stated before, trying to take my comments seriously may result in anyerisms or other brain illnesses. I still wish there were a font for sarcastic.

[sutlerjon]

Oops, there I went again, this is Twill, no place for "humor" ..... the discussion has been very enlightening .... even in CW era mercury was still being used to treat some things.

"Blue Mass" was, I believe, a mercury containing compound that was still being used to treat the "syphillis".

Please excuse my forgetting where I was and making jokes, like most everyone else, at Cross' expense ...

[Bos'n Cross]

oh mission i know about the humors theory, i was just saying that i would hate to see what aaccttuuaallllyy came out of the patients mouth......i book that i was looking up "black bile" in, explains it nicely........thanks for posting it though, its great for anyone and you put it more simply!

[Jib]

Mission any note of iodine being used to treat VD?

[Mission]

You know, in a search of my (currently) 937 pages of period medical notes, I did not find a single instance of iodine or its Latin equivalent. (And I have entered an awful lot of period medical recipes.)

[Mission]

Ok, I've posted a mini-web page of it's own containing period info on the pox (which includes that photo of Cross.) You can read the whole mess via this link.

[MarkG]

When I was in college I remember reading a book called The Columbian Exchange. It spent a chapter tracing Syphilis through the centuries. One thing I remember from it was that the sores were visible for the first century or so after it appeared in Europe. There are lines in Shakespeare referring to someone with a bad acne being unable to get women to kiss him for fear of catching the pox.

[John Maddox Roberts]

I recall reading many years ago a history of the pox that quoted a description of 16th-century German soldiers (romping merrily over Europe during the Religious Wars)nearly all of whom had the pox and whose faces sported not only open lesions, but also warty growths and excrescenses memorably described as "..some turned upward and pointed like horns, others twisting downward like spigots." This was during the first great wave of syphilis that swept through Europe, when the disease killed people much more swiftly and featured more colorful and picturesque symptoms.