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- [00:01]
Charlotte Vosper
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
Catherine Harvey
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Catherine Harvey
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Catherine Harvey
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Commercial Narrator
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- [00:31]
Charlotte Vosper
Demon Hunters, Haja Boys Breakfast meal and
- [00:32]
Catherine Harvey
Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans.
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Charlotte Vosper
What do you say to that Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:44]
Catherine Harvey
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor.
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Charlotte Vosper
No really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle.
- [00:55]
Catherine Harvey
Pick a meal to pick a side and participate in McDonald's while supplies last this Easter, skip the ordinary and whip up something golden with melty creamy Velveeta cheese.
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Charlotte Vosper
From scalloped potatoes to rich Mac and
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Catherine Harvey
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Charlotte Vosper
So go on, make it melt, make it craveable.
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Catherine Harvey
Make it indulgent.
- [01:23]
Charlotte Vosper
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Catherine Harvey
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Charlotte Vosper
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- [01:49]
Catherine Harvey
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Charlotte Vosper
See lowe's.com for details. Mulch offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.
- [02:05]
Podcast Host
Did medieval people really think about trying to live healthily? Didn't they all just die young? Well, according to Catherine Harvey, that's not quite the case. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper in this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Catherine discusses her latest book, the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living, revealing the practical and somewhat surprising ways in which medieval individuals thought about exercise, well being and food. And if you want to learn even more about the surprising stories of some of history's most remarkable delicacies, don't miss our new series, History's Greatest Dishes, which launches on the 13th of April. You can find more details about that in the description to this episode, but for now, it's over to Catherine and Charlotte.
- [02:50]
Charlotte Vosper
Your book is about the ways in which medieval people try to live healthy lives. But before we can dive into the ways in which people try to stay healthy, I think we need to establish the medical context in which medieval people were operating. So how were bodies understood in the medieval period?
- [03:08]
Catherine Harvey
So medieval people have really quite different ideas about how bodies work to us, and that's because they believe in what's called the humoral system, which means that health is basically based on the equilibrium of four bodily fluids, and they are blood and phlegm and black bile and yellow bile, and they all have different properties in terms of being hot or cold or wet or dry. So, for example, phlegm is a very cold, wet humour, whereas blood is hot. And so if those are kept in balance, then you're going to be healthy. And if they get out of balance, then you're going to be ill. And so the whole basis of medieval medicine is trying to keep those humours in balance and trying to rebalance them if you get ill. Everybody has their own, what's called a complexion, which is your individual humoral makeup, and so nobody's quite the same. But broadly speaking, young people are hot and moist and you get colder and drier as you get older, and men are hot and dry, whereas women are cold and moist. And things like where you live can affect your complexion. Basically, anybody healthy, they'll be roughly in balance, and if they get badly out of balance, you're going to be ill.
- [04:15]
Charlotte Vosper
So who would have had this kind of anatomical knowledge in the Middle Ages? How and where did medieval people learn ideas about the body and what was healthy?
- [04:26]
Catherine Harvey
So, I mean, much as is still true today, I suppose the really complicated technical stuff was very much confined to the specialists, and the specialists were people working in the universities. So by the later Middle Ages, you can study medicine at places like Oxford and Paris and Bologna. Monasteries are another sort of big centre of medical learning, obviously, as they are most kinds of learning. And you get some court physicians who are really knowledgeable, really well trained, write books and are really on the pulse of where medieval medicine is going. Obviously, most people are not doing things like reading out translations of Avicenna or writing their own medical textbooks. But I think there is probably more trickle down of knowledge than. Than we maybe would assume there was. So although there are very few university trained medical practitioners, most people probably would never have met one. There are lots and lots of medical practitioners, and I think what we can see is that even what we would consider to be untrained quacks working in sort of rural places actually are working broadly within the same tradition. They understand the humours. A lot of their techniques are quite similar. For example, there's a chap called John Crophill, who's. He's an Essex bailiff in the late 15th century. And basically his side hustle is he's a medical practitioner, as you do, but purely by chance, he's a commonplace book has survived. And so we can see the bits of medical treatises he copied into that, and he also includes details of his practice. So, for example, there's a list of people who he diagnosed by examining their urine. And what we can see from that is that this otherwise unknown chap in rural Essex has got broadly the same ideas and is using the same diagnostic methods, the same treatments as elite, expensive practitioners, which I think is really interesting. So no doubt knowledge was coming from them. I think something else that happens a lot that is quite a surprise to us because we tend to see religion and medicine as being in opposition, is that actually the church is quite an important source of medical knowledge, both because they think it's quite important for priests to have some basic medical knowledge. So, for example, when they do confessions, when they hear confessions and assign penances, they're supposed to take into account the individual's humoral balance, so they'll know which sins they're most susceptible to and what's an appropriate penance. And from the surviving sermons that we've got, they seem to have really quite liked a medical analogy. They compare confession to vomiting quite a lot, for example, which is disgusting, but makes a sort of sense. So I think people would have been picking up knowledge like that. And particularly as we get towards the end of the Middle Ages, more people are becoming literate, there are more books around, we start to see that it's not that uncommon for say, urban artisans, craftsmen and the like to have access to some basic medical information, maybe to copy a bit of it into their commonplace books. And one sort of text that becomes really popular towards the end of the Middle Ages are books called regimens. And they are basically how to guides about how to keep yourself healthy. And they focus usually on these six factors called the non naturals, which are air and environment, food and drink, movement and rest, exercise is part of that, sleep, excretion, so. So bodily fluids going in and out the body and your emotions. And basically the idea is that if people follow those guides, keep those in control, that will help them to stay healthy.
- [07:50]
Charlotte Vosper
Let's start with one of the medieval medical ideas that you've mentioned there. The non naturals, as you say, these were external factors that were thought to have a direct impact on the human body. One of those was the environment. So what kinds of environments did medieval people think were healthy? Or what environments did they think they needed to avoid?
- [08:11]
Catherine Harvey
So one of the things that is really important in the context of this particular non natural is air. They think that air, correctly, let's face it, they thought air had a really big impact on your health and so good air would help to keep you healthy. Bad air could make you ill, it could even kill you. Ideally, you want to be living in an environment with good air and a lot of that is fresh, clean air. I think mountain air is particularly good. Although, surprisingly to us, they're quite bothered about the idea of sea air being sort of too wet and potentially making you ill. So I don't think they'd have thought a trip to the seaside was the sort of healthy thing that we necessarily would think it was. Today they're very concerned about anywhere with sort of stagnant air, stagnant water. So marshes, anywhere that's very obviously polluted is a no, no. And they're very worried about air that's got trapped anywhere. So there are lots of stories about people who go down empty worlds to retrieve something and they're overcome by the trapped air and that makes them ill or it kills them. One of the theories about the Black Death is that it might have been caused by earthquakes releasing vapors from deep inside the earth, and that that was producing bad air that was then making everybody ill. So your ideal home in the Middle Ages was very much somewhere it's well ventilated, it's light and airy, away from bad smells. So we get people. There's a chap called Peter Fargola, who's a physician, who in the early 14th century writes a sort of a little regimen for his sons when they go off to university. And one of the things he says is that when they're picking somewhere to live, they must be really careful not to live next door to a smelly ditch or something. We get lots of people in the Middle Ages complaining about bad smells coming from their neighbours houses. If the neighbour's got a stinky toilet or is keeping pigs or something, they're really worried about that as a health risk. And the other thing they really like, obviously clean houses and they like gardens. They think that to have a garden and obviously you're only going to have one of Those, if you're relatively rich. But to have a garden with some grass, some nice flowers, maybe some tinkling water is very much good for you.
- [10:09]
Charlotte Vosper
This concern with a nice, clean, healthy environment might sound surprising to us because I think there's often a tendency to think that medieval people lived in filthy conditions and were themselves dirty. Is this true?
- [10:24]
Catherine Harvey
No, I think that's one of the most unfair stereotypes about the Middle Ages. Really? Because actually, no. I mean, they probably weren't as clean as us because they didn't have power showers and washing machines and all the luxuries that we now depend on. But no, they thought it was really important to be clean and they tried really hard to be clean. So they keep the houses clean. They're quite keen on sweeping floors and things. When people have done archaeological excavations of peasant cottages, they often find sort of dips that are clearly made by keep sweeping the floor. People are very concerned about keeping themselves clean. There's plenty of evidence for people bathing that it was thought to be a good idea to wash at least your hands and face when you got up in the morning, to wash your hands before and after meals, and that people did their laundry regularly. And so people were very much trying to keep their living environments clean. But also a lot of wider evidence for a growing interest in public health and a sense that it's the authority's job to make sure that a settlement is kept clean. And that means providing infrastructure to provide clean water and to take waste away. It means having. Employing people like street cleaners or. Or having rules about the residents. Some cities, you have to clean the street outside your house every Saturday. So the idea that they're all chucking everything into the streets is not true because otherwise they'd have had to go clean it up. And, yeah, lots of rules about waste disposal and where you can site things like toilets and pigsties and where butchers, they're very worried about butcher's waste. People get very upset if the butcher dumps all his offal in a ditch or something and people will complain to the authorities and get it taken away. So, yeah, I think much, much cleaner than we think they were.
- [11:58]
Charlotte Vosper
That definitely challenges a stereotype that I think a lot of people have of the medieval period. You mentioned toilets there. I've got to ask, where did medieval people go to the toilet?
- [12:09]
Catherine Harvey
I think the main thing is they went to the toilet where they were supposed to go to the toilet. So increasingly there are domestic latrines and they probably weren't very nice by our standards. They either drained into A river or they had to be emptied out by some poor soul. But, you know, that was where you did your business. There are lots of chamber pots and urinals and things that get dug up by archaeologists. And there are increasingly public toilets. York had some on the bridge over the Ouse by the mid 14th century. And people increasingly see paying for public toilets as quite a charitable thing to do. So people like Richard Whittington, the Mayor of London, he left some money in his will to build a new toilet block by the Thames. And I think there is a sense that although people obviously did release themselves in the streets, because people still do, let's face it, but that that wasn't the done thing and that the authorities do things to try and stop it. So for example, in Florence they apparently put crosses around the city walls to try and deter people. I think they think they won't feel it's quite right to wee on a cross, although at one point they had to employ somebody to clean up the church door because somebody has relieved themselves on it. So I don't know how well that works, but definitely there's this sense that they didn't like it any more than we do.
- [13:18]
Charlotte Vosper
Beyond keeping clean food and drink were other non naturals which medieval people were concerned with, as you've mentioned, what counted as healthy food and drink in the medieval period.
- [13:28]
Catherine Harvey
So I think this is an interesting one because although they were at least as obsessed by food and drink as we are, they had some quite different ideas because they conceptualize it again all in terms of the humours. So foods are labeled as hot and cold and wet and dry, rather than thinking in terms of sort of proteins and carbohydrates and all the stuff that we are preoccupied with now. And so that means that some of the foods that we would now consider really healthy, they're a bit worried about. So, for example, fresh fruit, things like apples and pears, because they're cold and moist, they think they're potentially quite dangerous. They think they're better if you eat them cooked. People did eat them raw, we know people ate them raw, but wasn't seen as a particularly healthy thing to do. And similarly fish, which we often now think of as a relatively healthy option because they thought it was, it was cold and it was wet and therefore it produced a lot of phlegm if you ate a lot of it. They were quite worried about that you could make it a bit safer by cooking it in ways that would sort of dry it out and warm it up. So frying for Example was quite good for fish, and they were also quite keen on the idea of using sauces to change the humoral balance. So you put the cold, wet fish in a hot sauce, and that can help to temper some of its qualities. And they also thought that exactly what you should eat depended on the individual, so things like your complexion would matter. So if you were already a very hot person, for example, you shouldn't eat too much really hot food that would make you even hotter where you were. The food of your native place was always thought to be the best for you. So whereas now we tend to think it's good to be adventurous, definitely the food from where you came from was the healthiest for you. And probably most problematic to us, they were very interested in the relationship between social status and what you should eat, because basically they thought that the wealthy had more delicate digestions and that meant that they needed to eat delicate foods. A lot of the wealthy eat a bit like invalids, so they eat things like a lot of chicken and they drink wine, and that's because that's what's suitable for their delicate digestions. Whereas a peasant who's got this coarse peasant digestion can manage rough bread and beef. Beef is thought of as quite a coarse meat in the Middle Ages, and those sorts of foods produce a lot of superfluities. But if you're a peasant working out in the fields all day, that's okay, because you'll sweat them off so they
- [15:36]
Charlotte Vosper
won't make you ill. Wow, that's really surprising, isn't it, that actually what was prescribed as healthy not only depended on the individual's complexion, but also their class and status. I suppose one thing it's worth mentioning, though, at a time when many people lived at a subsistence level in the medieval period, what did people actually eat and drink, despite these ideas of what was ideally healthy?
- [15:59]
Catherine Harvey
Yeah, I mean, I think for most of the population, the diet is actually quite narrow, because these regimens often contain pages and pages of descriptions of the humoral balance of all sorts of foods most peasants are never going to encounter, because most of them were subsisting largely on bread and pottage vegetables. They eat quite a lot of brassicas, things like cabbage and ale is a really important part of the calories of the peasant diet. The availability of things like meat and cheese and fish to the peasantry is very variable, depending on the season and whereabouts in the country you are. You know, if you happen to be lucky enough to live next to a river with lots of wild salmon or something, you Might be eating it. But, yeah, the average diet is probably quite restricted.
- [16:38]
Charlotte Vosper
While the idea of eating healthily might feel familiar to us today, are there any medieval health practices which feel particularly far removed from our modern understanding of health?
- [16:48]
Catherine Harvey
I think probably the ones that are most disturbing to us are the ones about excretion, so the ones that are designed to remove surplus humours from the body. So, for example, they talk sometimes about purging, about sort of making yourself vomit or go to the loo a lot. They don't do that as much as maybe we think they did, but they definitely do use it sometimes as a preventative form of medicine. And I think to us that's quite problematic. And the other one they were very keen on was phlebotomy, so regular bleeding, which they definitely used as a preventative strategy. To us, the idea that you might have yourself bled to stop yourself being ill feels like a bad idea, but they definitely thought it was a good way to make sure that your humours stayed in balance.
- [17:32]
Charlotte Vosper
Bloodletting is something which feels quite far removed from our modern understanding of health. Where might people have gone to have their bloodlet in the Middle Ages, or who was having their bloodlet?
- [17:43]
Catherine Harvey
So it often seems to have been done by barbers. So a barber in the Middle Ages would cut her hair. But they also did sort of basic body care, which included bloodletting. In a monastery, say, for example, it might be the infirmar who does it. There are a few female phlebotomists that we know about who went into convents and bled nuns. And there is a little bit of evidence, I think, to suggest that sometimes people bled themselves at home. Flames, the tools that are used to sort of make you bleed, have sometimes turned up in domestic rubbish heaps. And some people think that that suggests that people were doing this themselves, which seems like quite a bad idea. But generally it was done quite carefully that, you know, there's a lot of stuff about when you should do it, where you should do it from, who you should do it to. So it's definitely not just bleeding pints of blood from everybody willy nilly, as maybe the stereotypes suggest. One group who were particularly into phlebotomy were the clergy and particularly monks. And I think that's because there are some aspects of their lifestyle that were thought to be quite unhealthy. And to encourage the buildup of humours, they eat a lot of fish. And we've already talked about how fish is problematic and they're not allowed to have sex, which is an important form of excretion. So if you're living like that, then they think it's a good idea to be bled several times a year to stop you getting ill. And so yeah, in a lot of religious houses we can see that tends to be about every three months they're sent off to be phlebotomized.
- [19:10]
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- [21:46]
Catherine Harvey
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- [21:48]
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- [21:55]
Catherine Harvey
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- [22:12]
Charlotte Vosper
You mentioned that sex was understood as a form of excretion in the medieval period. Does that mean that sex was seen as a healthy thing in the Middle Ages?
- [22:22]
Catherine Harvey
So it's a healthy thing in moderation as part of a healthy lifestyle? I think it would be fair to say definitely. They're quite concerned that it can make you ill if you're not having sex. So there are stories about it's usually clerics who can't have sex because of their vocation, and over time that starts to make them ill. And they're warned, well, you're either gonna have to have sex or you're gonna die. And if they're saintly, they go, well, I'm gonna die. And so there are a few medieval saints who are supposed to have died of celibacy. It can also be a problem for women. Cause although that might seem a bit odd to us, they think that women also expel seed during sex. And so if women are not having sex, that will build up inside their body and it can cause suffocation of the womb and all sorts of terrible problems. If you're a woman, the best cure for that is to get married. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean that you could just keep having sex as much as you like, because that can also make you ill. And so there's one story that sticks in my mind about I think it's a 12th century nobleman who has just married his much younger third wife and he gets ill and his doctor says, well, you can't have sex otherwise you're going to die. And he does anyway and he dies. So it's very much an immoderation thing rather than as much as you like.
- [23:35]
Charlotte Vosper
We might also associate medieval ideas about sex with the teachings of the Christian Church. As you mentioned earlier, Christian teachings definitely guided medieval understandings of health so what was the role of religious morals in medieval medical theory?
- [23:52]
Catherine Harvey
So I think it's really important because, as you say, it does. Religion does shape a lot of people's attitudes to things like sex, to regular fasting, to all sorts of things that are also important in terms of health. And I think it's really important to remember when we're talking about medieval medicine, that although we see religion as medicine as two very different things, they didn't. It was very much sort of two overlapping ways of understanding the world and understanding your body. So it was quite usual, for example, for a physician to prescribe both medical and spiritual remedies, to give you a bottle of medicine, but also a charm to use on something. And they both play a role in preventative medicine. One idea that's increasingly important in the later Middle Ages is a preoccupation with the idea that the body is God's creation. So you've got a spiritual duty to look after it, as well as sort of a selfish one to try and keep yourself healthy. And they also very much see your physical and spiritual and mental health as being intertwined. They're very interested in the mind body connection in a slightly different way than we are, because it brings the spiritual in more. But very much that connection between your physical and mental health is very much there. So they see things like going to church or confessing or having religious images in your house as things that are good for your soul. They're good for you spiritually, but they're also good for your mental and therefore your physical health. It all ties up.
- [25:09]
Charlotte Vosper
That mind body connection is really interesting. Do you think that connection equates to evidence of an awareness of mental health in the Middle Ages?
- [25:18]
Catherine Harvey
I think it does. I think we tend to think that mental health is something that's quite a recent interest. But I think, no, it's very apparent reading medieval texts, that actually they worried about a lot of the same things that we do. So they worried, for example, that stress could make you ill. You know, that if your job was a bit too much, there's a monk, a Revo in Yorkshire in the Middle Ages, who writes to his friends at another abbey, basically complaining that he holds one of the monastic offices, has to keep getting through the night to organize things, and it's making him ill, he's going to die if he doesn't stop doing this job. He's very much. His attitude and probably we've all been there, we can all relate with that. And they worry about things like anger management, you know, that if you. If you keep getting angry, anger very much heats the body and dries the body, so it's seen as being a bad thing. If you can't control your temper, that will make you ill. They talk a lot about melancholy, which is a bit like depression. They worry about keeping their minds active in old age. There are things in regimens about old people doing maths problems to keep their minds active, which we still go. We'll do the Sudoku puzzle. So I don't think that's changed a lot. And negative emotions are very much a problem because they dry out the body, they shorten life, whereas joy moistens the body. So joy being happy is very much good for your health, and the things that make you happy are good for you. And so they encourage people to listen to music, to spend time with their friends, to wear nice new clothes, read books, all the things that we still like doing. Again, it has to be moderation. You can die of too much joy, so you have to be a bit careful. But generally, joy is seen as a good thing. And they're very keen on the idea that managing your emotions can prevent illness. So particularly during the Black Death, they get very worried that the world is very depressing and that things like lots of people wearing morning garbage keep hearing funeral bells will actually make people more fed up and therefore more vulnerable to illness. To the extent that in some places they actually ban morning garb or funeral bells so as not to frighten people too much.
- [27:21]
Charlotte Vosper
That idea of promoting joy in the medieval period sounds quite surprising to us, I think. But a more familiar idea is that the medieval church taught that women's bodies were sinful. So with that in mind, how are things like menstruation, pregnancy and menopause understood?
- [27:41]
Catherine Harvey
There is a lot of negative stuff coming out of certain quarters of the church about women's bodies and sin and menstruation being the result of the fall and pain in childbirth being the result of the fall. But I think from the medical texts, actually, we get a lot more practical stuff and a lot more sensible stuff. And so, for example, we get things like remedies for menstrual problems, for painful periods, for having no periods, all of that sort of stuff. There are regimens for pregnant women. There's a particularly good one by a doctor called Michael Savonarola, who's writing in Italy in the 15th century, and he's got lots of helpful advice about what women should do when they're trying to conceive, what they need when they're pregnant and A lot of that is quite sensible. It's the importance of rest but still doing some exercise. It's the importance of eating healthily. Although some of his ideas we now think were wrong because, for example, he encourages pregnant women to drink lots of wine. And he also talks about the importance of being looked after when you're having the baby and the importance of a period to recover afterwards. So that all seems quite, quite sensible from a medical perspective. They don't talk that much about menopause, I think probably partly because we tend to see it as a process and they were more focused on the moment that a woman isn't having periods anymore so she can't have children anymore. Obviously the women themselves must have known that it was a process and experienced all the symptoms that were with it. But yeah, the medical texts tend to talk about it in more blunt terms, although, again, I mean, there are remedies for things like night sweats and heavy bleeding and stuff that would have been helpful. And they are aware that it does make a broader difference to women's health, for example, so that the menstruation is very much thought to be a useful plagiation of a woman's body. She's getting all this excess humours but nasty stuff out of her body. And once she stops having periods, they're quite worried about all of that backing up inside of her body. And one of the consequences of that can be a susceptibility to breast cancer, which they think is caused by that blood then going to the breasts and stagnating there.
- [29:43]
Charlotte Vosper
You mentioned breast cancer there. We don't typically associate medieval people with knowing about or understanding cancer. Is that something that they did understand and think about?
- [29:55]
Catherine Harvey
I think they did have a concept of cancer, but it is a term that's used much more broadly to include all sorts of sores and abscesses and things that we definitely now wouldn't consider to be cancer. But definitely there are cases of breast cancer is the one that gets talked about most often, I suppose, because it's a sort of semi external thing that's relatively easy to detect. They're not terribly keen on trying to do surgery for it. I think they probably know that it doesn't work very well. They're a bit worried that sort of touching tumours can make them spread. But, yeah, it does crop up in a way that we maybe wouldn't expect it to.
- [30:29]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think one thing that's also worth mentioning is that we've been discussing ideas about health in medieval Christian Europe. So how are ideas about the body and healthy practices different beyond Europe in the Middle Ages?
- [30:47]
Catherine Harvey
So I think there's probably there are more connections that you might think, because a lot of these medical ideas are shared by Jewish and Muslim cultures. And in fact, some of the most influential medical texts in Europe in the Middle Ages are translated from texts by Muslim doctors like Avicenna. So there is a lot of interconnection there. Obviously, there are various different systems in some parts of the world. China and Japan, for example, have got very different systems linked to their traditional medicine that is still practiced in those parts of the world. But I think globally there are quite a lot of shared concerns. So, for example, we can see people across the world being worried about hygiene and about bad hygiene as a threat to health. And so there's a chap called Ibn Battuta, he's a Moroccan traveler who goes around all over the place in the 14th century. And there's a bit that sticks in my mind where he turns up to, I think it's a port town somewhere in Somalia, and he says it's the dirtiest, most stinking town in the world and he won't stay there because he thinks it's so unhealthy. There's a lot of concerns around the world about blood as a source of disease. So I think a lot of. Although sometimes the theory behind them is quite different, a lot of the concerns stay the same wherever you go, as they've stayed the same across time in a lot of ways.
- [31:58]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, absolutely. We've been talking lots about guidance to stay healthy in the medieval period, but I suppose the question is, did it pay off? Did medieval Europeans live long, healthy lives? Or as is often assumed, did they all die young?
- [32:16]
Catherine Harvey
So their life expectancy was lower than ours, but it is really heavily skewed by horrendously high infant mortality. And so if you get to 5, your chances of getting to a decent life are getting quite a lot better. If you get to adulthood, they're relatively good. It's been estimated that in 15th century Italy, based on some really good demographic information for certain towns in early 15th century Italy. And it's been worked out that about 15% of the population is over 60, which I think is probably quite a lot higher than we'd assume. It's not unheard of for people in the Middle Ages to get into their 70s, 80s, even 90s. And people who have relatives who've got very old are often very proud of them in the same way that we are Now, So I think it's the Petrich who's very proud that his grandfather got to be 104. And they're very interested in what they can do to help them live long, healthy lives. I think we sometimes think there's a passively accepted, they were all gonna die young. But I think all this preventative medicine very much shows that they didn't. That they really did think that if you lived a healthy lifestyle, it could help you to live longer. Which, let's face it, is what we still hope. And you do get in the same way as today. We get these people who are very interested in trying to work out how they're gonna live for 200 years or something. And people in the Middle Ages were playing around with the same stuff that some people get the idea that, well, maybe if you could give an older body an infusion of the heat and warmth of a younger body, that would keep you going for longer. So you get people who do things like drink the blood of a young person or drink breast milk, because they hope that's going to reinvigorate them. And they also are very interested in the potential health benefits of gold, because gold's like the perfect element. It's perfectly balanced. And so they think that maybe if you eat or drink gold, that will help you to live longer. It gets very big at the Papal Curia. A lot of the cardinals are really into it, and Pope John XXI is obsessed with the idea of working out how he's gonna live for a really long time, and then a ceiling falls on him, he dies. So that didn't work out for him. But definitely that interest is there, and also the interest in trying to have a good quality old age. So, again, we've talked about regimens for different groups of people, for pregnant women and the like, and there are Certainly, by the 15th century, regimens for old people. And a lot of the advice is still quite similar about all the healthy living stuff that we've talked about. There are some slightly odd ideas. They're quite concerned. One of them suggests that cat's breath is particularly dangerous to all people. Not entirely sure why, but that's apparently something to avoid. But, yeah, the idea that it's very important actually, as you get older to keep yourself active, that you should still exercise. You might have to do gentler exercise, might now be a little stroll rather than a boisterous ball game, but you should still be exercising. You should still be engaging with the world, reading, doing things to keep your mind active in a way that I think is quite surprising to us.
- [35:12]
Charlotte Vosper
It definitely is. And the idea that drinking goals would keep you young is just brilliant, isn't it?
- [35:18]
Catherine Harvey
So I don't want to try that one.
- [35:19]
Charlotte Vosper
No, don't try that at home. Now, finally, what do you hope the impact of your book will be? What does this view of medieval people trying to live long, healthy lives offer our listeners who might consider the medieval period in a different way?
- [35:35]
Catherine Harvey
Yeah, so, I mean, I suppose it is largely about trying to correct stereotypes and to show people that, yeah, people in the Middle Ages were in a lot of ways quite like us and that they worried about their health and they tried to keep themselves healthy and they wanted to live long, healthy lives and that they were concerned about things like hygiene that we very much assume that they were not. And I think that's a benefit to us both in terms of sort of connections with the past, but also maybe in terms of how we view ourselves. Because I think sometimes the Middle Ages, we put it down to make ourselves feel better about ourselves that, you know, these things couldn't happen to us. And probably to be aware that maybe they didn't all die of black deaths because they were stupid is a good thing to be aware of. But I think also there probably are things that we could take from, from their approach to healthy living because, I mean, obviously we wouldn't want to go back to the Middle Ages. I definitely don't want to try medieval medicine. And we're very lucky that we've got all the wonderful treatments and vaccines and things that we've now got. But I think in terms of their emphasis on healthy living and this idea that prevention is better than a cure, it probably is true. And to think of some of these things a little bit more is good for us, I think.
- [36:49]
Podcast Host
That was Catherine Harvey speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Catherine is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of London where she works as a historian specializing in the medieval and early modern periods. Her latest book is the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living. And as I mentioned, don't miss history's greatest dishes. For more on how people in the past thought about food and drink. All the details for that are in the description to this episode. Episode.
- [37:22]
Catherine Harvey
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Catherine Harvey
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Catherine Harvey
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