Napoleon Bonaparte and The Teenage Girl Who Won His Heart

Catch me today over at Enchanted by Josephine for a guest post on Betsy Balcombe.

Illustration Friday: Drink with Caution

Here is my contribution to Illustration Friday’s theme: Caution. This is a page from my next book, I Feel Better with Mustard on my Head, (due out in 2010) which will illustrate history’s wackiest medical cures. I promise to wait for the book’s release before maggots, mud and mummy powder dominate this blog, but I did want to share with readers one of my favorite medical tools of the trade –Uroscopy (the study or urine).

The first pregnancy tests

Gardening meets science
Egyptians used urine to diagnose pregnancy by having the female pee on barley and wheat seeds. If the seeds grew then the patient could expect a little sprout of their own. Supposedly, barley seeds indicated a boy and wheat indicated a girl. Scientists today know that the estrogen in a pregnant woman’s urine would make the seeds sprout faster.

In the yellow
By the 10th century, physicians had become experts on predicting pregnancy by studying urine’s color, smell, cloudiness and taste to predict pregnancy. What color is a pregnant woman’s urine? A “clear pale lemon color leaning toward off-white” was a sure a sign that baby was on its way. (1) Some medieval doctors mixed wine with urine to see how it would react. Although lemon color urine is not a good indicator of pregnancy, they were on to something with their wine and pee cocktail because alcohol reacts with certain proteins in urine. Stories also indicate that medieval doctors were not as wacky as we might think. In one example, the Duke of Bavaria got a little sick of his doctor sniffing his bodily excretions so he decided to put him to a test: he swapped his urine with a pregnant woman. The physician soon proclaimed that a miracle was eminent—the duke was to give birth.


The Honey Urine Test
Physicians throughout the middle ages and into the 16th century accurately diagnosed diabetes by tasting the sweetness of urine. It was usually the job of an apprentice to do the swilling, but sometimes (presumably when they weren’t in the mood to taste urine), they would pour it in the sand and see if ants were drawn to it. (Ants love sugar.) As discussed in a previous post, I highly doubt Henry VIII suffered from diabetes when his doctors were so well-versed on detecting it in his urine. Today, we know that one of the symptoms of diabetes is sweet urine.

Your future is clear
Some medieval doctors took the pee gazing one step further and even claimed they could predict a patient’s future by their pee. These fortune-telling pee experts were often given the derogatory label of - “piss prophets". Piss prophets even claimed that they could tell whether a girl was still a virgin. Supposedly, A virgin had clear urine and a non-virgin's urine was cloudy. The piss prophets were attacked as charlatans in Elizabeth I’s reign and soon fell out of favor by the seventeenth century. Still, we should give these strange pee experts some credit. Today, we know that cloudiness in urine is a sign of an infection and is one of the many symptoms of gonorrhea. Unfortunately, you can also get cloudiness if you eat a big meal or drink milk which is high in phosphates. Imagine getting accused of being loose just because you drank a glass of milk before your medieval virginity test?

Quiz time: that’s not apple juice:
In the 1600s, a physician named Christian Franz Paullini stated boldly that “ with the aid of feces and urine, it is possible to cure, from head to foot internally and externally, all disease, no matter how severe of poisonous is may seem to be.” (2)Throughout history, urine has been used as a cure-all for everything from stomach aches, rheumatism, gout, ear aches, wounds and even madness.

See if you can guess which of the following urine cures actually worked:

A. Drinking urine to cure madness
B. Peeing on wounds to sterilize them
C. Drinking urine for an upset stomach
D. Curing athletes foot by peeing on yourself

Now scroll down for the answers....














Keep scrolling you fool.







If you are ever caught out in the wilderness with a gaping wound you may need to know this…





A: Mad as a pregnant donkey: Maybe
In ancient Greece, physicians treated madness by making their patients drink donkey pee. If the donkey happened to be pregnant, they were actually giving them the same medicinal benefits as our modern birth control. Many modern birth control pills contain estrogen that is derived from….yes horse and donkey pee. Although, you could argue that estrogen might just make a mad person weepy instead of violent?

B: Nature’s antiseptic: Yes
After battles, surgeons would pee on a soldier’s wound before attempting to sew it back up. This may have been somewhat beneficial because urine is completely sterile when it first leaves the body. It would certainly beat cleaning a wound with dirty water.

C: Bottoms up! No
If you were a doctor in medieval times, you wouldn’t be caught dead without your handy physician’s guide, Rosa Anglica. Along with ridiculous cures such as surrounding small pox patients with the color red, the Rosa Anglica also advised drinking fresh mourning urine to treat dropsy and stomach aches. There is currently a whole new-age movement that swears by drinking urine to restore the natural flora in your stomach. But until they package this cure in a bottle with a pretty label, I am going to stick to my Tums.

D: The pioneer pedicure: No
Our grandparents from the turn of the century had an ingenious way of curing athlete’s foot. They simply soaked their tootsies in a pail of fresh urine. Today, some bright people still pee on themselves in the shower to stop the itch. (Just think what is going on in your gym). Urine does contain urea which kills germs but the amount of urea in your body won’t make a difference nor does urea kill the fungus that causes Athlete’s foot.

So how did you do?

Physician examining urine flask from the Wellcome Library

Notes:
(1) p. 610, Enger
(2) p.18, Janos

Sources and Further Reading:
Magner, Louis. A History of Medicine. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2005.
Janos, Elisabeth. Country Folk Medicine, Tales of Skunk Oil, Sassafras Tea, and Other Old-Time Remedies. Gilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 1990.
Blank, Hanne. Virgin: The Untouched History, New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Eldon, Enger, Et Al Concepts in Biology' 2007 Ed.2007.

For the British readers

The new season of The Tudors has started in the UK and I got an email asking if there is one location to find all of the "Historical vs. Hollywood" posts in order. REMINDER: These posts contain spoilers.



Here they are:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Final Episode part 1
Final Episode part 2

I will put up a permanent link on the left hand side shortly...

Happy Birthday Napoleon!..a dancing Elmo was the best I could do

Today marks the birthday of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later this week, I will be guest blogging at Enchanted by Josephine on the teenage girl that won Napoleon’s heart at St. Helena – Betsy Balcombe. In the meantime, head over to My Napoleon Obsession for a special birthday post.

Why does Napoleon have Elmo's body?
I have been trying to honor Boney’s B-day by giving my 20 month old a reenactment of Napoleon’s life. So far, the best casting I have found is Elmo as Napoleon (he moves when you press his hand and Napoleon’s should never sit still) and Dora the Explorer as Josephine. (if only Dora had Josephine’s fashion sense). She enjoyed my little play until Marie Louise (played by a stuffed cow) kicked Dora off her plastic, purple throne and stole Elmo away. But alas....you are never too young to enjoy a good love story. When she gets old enough, I will give her Sandra Gulland’s Josephine trilogies. Let’s just hope I have not ruined it for her by then.

Alison Weir podcast on Anne Boleyn

Here is an interesting podcast from Alison Weir on why Anne Boleyn got such a raw deal.

Amazing Grace - Could you survive a voyage on a Slave Ship?

I am not sure if it is the pregnancy hormones shrinking and expanding my brain, but I recently had a strange memory of my childhood. I was about 8 or 9 and walked in on my mother and father having a disagreement on whether I should be allowed to stay up late to watch the miniseries Roots. My dad wanted us to watch it. He had grown up in a rural area of Mississippi and actually witnessed a lynching. He was afraid that Black American History would be a subject skimmed over in my classroom. (he was probably correct). My mother had grown up in an affluent all-white area and thought the series was too graphic for an eight year old. (She was probably correct too) My dad eventually won and my siblings and I cuddled close together night after night to watch Roots on our dial controlled/antenna TV.

Well, I had not seen Roots since I was a child, so I recently decided to watch it again. Right about the time that the slave traders cut off Kunta Kinta’s foot, I remembered why I had not watched it in all of these years. The miniseries is really gut-wrenchingly sad. And the scenes on the slave ships would make even a nonhormonal person weepy. Since some of my favorite royals invested in the slave trade including Elizabeth I, Charles II, and James II, I wanted to know if conditions were really as bad as the Hollywood version. I found they were a lot worse.

The smell of death
If you were to step onto a slave ship in the 18th century, you would first be hit with the unforgettable smell of sea salt, human excrement, sweat, tears, and most horrific of all…. death. Death on a slave ship was inescapable. The mortality rate was as high as 25% on some slave voyages with many dying of disease and dysentery. Others jumped overboard or hung themselves with their cotton shirts preferring suicide to their confinement. Many starved themselves to death. If a slave did survive the voyage, they could barely walk once they reached their destination (usually the Americas).

If you could breath at all...
The design of a typical slave ship looks too grotesque to be real. Slaves slept packed in rows and were emerged in complete darkness. In 1788, an act passed in Britain decreed that each male slave had six feet, sixteen inches of square feet. Each female had five feet sixteen inches. Boys had five feet, fourteen inches and girls had four and a half feet by twelve inches. Worst of all, slaves had only two feet of breathing space above them to block out their neighbor’s screams. We can imagine that if you got seasick then it would be on yourself and your neighbor.

Working on a Slave Ship
Not that we should have much sympathy, but the crew didn’t exactly have cruise ship living conditions either. They were often given the same food as the slaves, worked excruciating long hours and were physically abused by their captains. Captain Colley of Liverpool even beat his cook to death with an iron rod. I guess he wasn’t happy with his meal.

Fine Dining on a Slave Ship
The food consisted of a barely palpable ration of rice, farina, yams and bran with very little water. If you are of African American descent then there is a good chance that you struggle with high blood pressure. You inherited high blood pressure from your ancestors because the only slaves that survived were those who had an ability to retain salt.

Dancing on a Slave Ship
The only relief from this confinement was when the slaves were brought on board to be examined by the doctor or get some exercise. Men, women and children were shackled to a long chain attached to a ring on the deck. Often, they were forced to sing and dance to exercise their limbs. Hypocritically, captains also forced slaves to recite Grace before meals in a religion that meant nothing to them. One of these captains was Reverend John Newton who ordered that Grace be said twice a day on his slave ship. He was later to become an abolitionist and is best remembered for writing the popular hymn, Amazing Grace.

Here is a beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace sung by Leann Rimes.

Slavery Remembrance day will be celebrated this year on August 23rd to commemorate the uprising of enslaved Africans on the island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) in 1791. Visit the International Slavery Museum to lean more.

Sources and Further Reading:Kleinman, Joseph & Kurtis-Kleinman, Eileen. Life on an African Slave Ship, San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2001.

Parliament and British Slave Trade 1600-1807

International Slavery Museum

Art from the International Slavery Museum

And the winner is...

The winner of The French Mistress by Susan Holloway Scott is Alyson. I have emailed the winner and just need your mailing address. Congratulations to last month's winner.

Read the interview

I am a little behind on my reading this month so I am not sure what August's Raucous Book of the Month will be yet. To be disclosed soon...

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