You're Dead to Me - Renaissance Medicine: healthcare and disease in early modern England

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Greg Jenner is joined in the sixteenth century by Dr Alanna Skuse and comedian Ria Lina to learn all about medicine and medical professionals in Tudor and Stuart England. In Renaissance-era England, medicine was still based on the theory of the four humours, passed down from ancient Greek and Roman physicians like Hippocrates and Galen. But from the reign of Henry VIII, there were signs of change. The invention of the printing press led to an explosion in medical and anatomical books, and the circulation of ideas from across Europe. The College of Physicians was founded in 1518, and the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1543. Medicine became a real business, with a range of specialists, professional bodies overseeing different kinds of healthcare, and an explosion of medical providers advertising their services to the general public. This episode explores the landscape of healthcare in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, looking at everyone from physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to domestic healers and midwives, and even taking in quacks and frauds. Along the way, it examines the sensible social distancing measures taken during the Great Plague, the cures both sensible and dangerous offered for all kinds of diseases, and the cutting-edge experiments men like William Harvey and Christopher Wren were carrying out on the circulation of the blood. If you’re a fan of the history of everyday life in Tudor England, petty professional rivalries, and the whacky wellness trends of the past, you’ll love our episode on medicine in Renaissance England. If you want more from Ria Lina, listen to our episodes on pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao and medieval traveller Marco Polo. And for more on the history of health and wellness, check out our episodes on Ancient Medicine, Renaissance Beauty and the Kellogg Brothers. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Katharine Russell Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

Hello and welcome to Your Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name's Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we're putting on our plague masks and rummaging in our doctor's bags as we head back to 16th century England to learn all about Renaissance-era medicine. And to help us, we are joined by not one, but two esteemed doctors. In History Corner, she's an associate professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, where her research focuses on medicine and the body from the 16th to 18th centuries. And luckily for us, she's also the author of the fantastic new book, The Surgeon, the Midwife and the Quack.

How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England. It's Dr Alana Scus. Welcome Alana. Hello, nice to be here. Lovely to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actor and writer. You might have seen her on all the TV on Live at the Apollo, QI, pointless, and having good news for you. Maybe you've caught her live shows or heard her on Radio 4's The News Quiz,

but you'll definitely remember her from our show, So episodes of Chungi Sao and Marco Polo, of course, it's Dr. Ria Lina. Welcome, Dr. Ria. Thank you so much. I rarely use that title, so it's nice to use it. I mean, you're such a sort of renowned comedian. People might not know this. You have a PhD in virology. I do for my sins. I have a PhD in herpes. That's my specialty. The classic root into comedy. It just doesn't come up much, especially on a first day. I really...

So if you are a trained scientist, modern medicine, presumably you're pretty comfortable. Do you know about the history of medicine? I know bits and pieces. I did the evolution of herpes. That was sort of my, well, not the evolution of it, like from what it looked like at the beginning to what it looks like now. I mean, it was pretty much the same. Well, it wasn't. But you know what I mean? Like, I know bits and pieces. But when you study virus evolution, it actually doesn't come up in terms of human medicine as frequently as you would have thought, even though you can kind of look back and go, ah, that was a virus. That was a virus. But so I'm excited. Good, good. Especially 16th century. I've been sitting here for five minutes going, is that the 1500s or the 1700? Because it's always one number out, isn't it?

It's the 1500s. Well, I was going to ask you, actually, you know, does the phrase Renaissance era England mean anything to you? See, when you say Renaissance, great. I'm thinking Italians. I'm thinking French. I'm thinking some wonderful progression in science. Then you said England and I went, oh, that's a very different thing.

You know, that could be as a very different thing. You know, that could be as big as we don't poo and sight outdoors anymore. Do you know what I mean? Progress for the English, especially back then, wasn't quite the same as progress for the rest of Europe. So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And thanks to Shakespeare's plays and the many weird and wonderful adaptations you've seen, plus all the pop culture about tutors and stewards, you've probably got some sense of what life was like in Renaissance era, England. But what about disease and healthcare specifically. Well, maybe, like me, you're just thinking of the classic scene in Blackadder, where the cure for everything is leeches. But what was visiting the doctor in Renaissance England really like? Was there more to it than plague masks? Did they use plague masks? And what about those

leeches? Were they true? Oh, and who on earth was the stroker? Let's find out. Ria, when we say Renaissance England, you're thinking post-Italy and France. In your head, you've got a lovely image of Michelangelo sort of doing art. All of the turtles. doing their thing. Definitely. But if you're going to narrow it to the 1500s, and of course you've mentioned Shakespeare, this is screaming to me,

specifically Queen Elizabeth, the first, because I'm not going to give Mary that much credit for any kind of progress in the five years that she... I'm sorry, I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. Dr. Alana, you've used the phrase English Renaissance. As a historian, I typically would say early modern periods. So I'm curious, what is...

I mean, Ria's done a pretty good job there, but why is the English Renaissance not the Italian Renaissance? Okay, so you're right. What I write about is mostly the early modern period because I wrote 16th and 17th centuries, 1,500 and 1600s. But you cannot put early modern in a book like 450 times. So we just had to go with Renaissance because that's what everybody knows. It's a great word.

It's good, isn't it? And it's got a bit more sparkle to it than early modern. Thank you to the French. Yeah, Renaissance. Yeah, I think the archaeologists call it post-medieval, which is even worse. That's even worse. I mean, you can't trust archaeologists with anything. No. My brother's an archaeologist, so I would know. We're talking here about a renaissance that arrives in England later than in Italy and in France.

So it's the Tudor and Stuart eras, you know, 16th, 17th centuries. Is there a kind of commonality between European medicine and English medicine in this period? There really is. There's a lot of overlap. In fact, it's not very different from each other. You're right about the Catholic Church losing its power in England and so stuff starts to be more in English. But that's kind of happening all over the continent because we often think that the church has really been like stamping down on medicine before this and that they didn't let people do anatomies and stuff. Actually, it's not true.

The church never stopped people from doing anatomies. There weren't enough people being hanged, basically, to provide enough dead bodies that nobody would mind you anatomising. Once you have cities, you got more crime, you get more people being hanged. You also get universities, more people wanting to see the anatomies. Alana, what does anatomize mean? It means cutting up somebody's dead body to have a look inside. Fair enough.

And the English doctors are going all over the continent and they're going to these new anatomy theatres in Leiden and Padua and Paris and stuff. And they're going to the hospitals as well. Paris is meant to be like the best place in Europe for hospitals. Well, not exactly the best for hospitals, but the best for having a big hospital that will let you do weird stuff to the patients. That's quite the caveat, isn't it? Yeah.

It's the best hospital. No. Yeah, it really depends which end of the treatment you're on there. And they bring that all back. There's also loads of migrants coming into England, and a lot of those are doctors. So a lot of people coming from Huguenot-France over here and bringing their skills with them.

Right. How dare they arrive on boats with skills? I know. I'm outraged. The absolute temerity of it. And I suppose the other thing to say is this is after the printing press, right? We are post-Guttenberg, so we're getting the proliferation of written stuff. Yeah, loads and loads of books. More people who can read. Lots of people, if you can read,

the chances are that you can read a bit of several different languages. Right. Yeah, so a lot of even fairly low-down medical practitioners, like the apothecaries, can read a little bit of Latin as well. But obviously, once you're publishing things in English, that makes a new market, which is people who haven't gone to university, they aren't physicians or anything, but they're just kind of interested and they're just buying it to have in the house a bit like you would buy like a first aid book. You know, we're talking here about before the discovery of micro organisms, Ria, you know, before your specialism even exists. They haven't got microscopes just yet. Well, okay, sure, they existed. But the study didn't exist. No.

So, you know, we're talking here about a time where the theory of medicine hasn't changed in over a thousand years. Is that fair, Alana? Broadly, yeah. So the main thing that they believe is Galenism. It's the idea. of the four humours, and there's these four humours that go around in your body, and they're on this spectrum of hot, cold, wet, dry. So you have black bile, which is cold and dry, blood, which is hot and wet. You've got yellow bile, which is hot and dry, and then phlegm, the most appealing humour, which is cold and wet.

And kind of confusingly, they all also go around in the blood. So the blood that you see if you cut yourself, that's nutritive blood, but the blood that is in mix with all those humours, that's sanguine blood. So it's slightly confusing. But it does kind of make sense. If you don't know about microorganisms and stuff, this is quite an intuitive way of viewing your body. And we still talk about being in a good or bad humor or whatever.

Yeah, we do. And we still talk about melancholic and stuff, don't we? I need you to go back a bit. Because, okay, blood, hot and dry. No, blood's hot and wet. Oh, it's wet? Yeah, okay, that makes more sense. I'll be honest.

Blood is hot and wet. Okay, I'm with you so far. That's the really good one. That's what you want. That's the one we want. Yeah, that's the one that men have. Flem's cold and wet. Flem is cold and wet. Okay, that's like, so I'm, I'm with you so far.

I'm blowing my, like, I'm living in the 1500s. I blow my nose cold and wet. I cut myself hot and wet. Then we get to black and yellow bile. Yeah. Which I'll be, you know, I know what bile is. I've never come across my own bile. Like, so where are we coming across yellow and black bile?

Which, by the way, I thought was green. So. So black bile. Yeah, black bile, they also call melancholy. Yeah. So if somebody is kind of got like big dark circles under their eyes or they're generally of a not like black or brown skinned but of a dark complexion, then they would be thought to have a lot of black bile. So that's cold and dry. Yes.

So there are personality types associated to medical humoral conditions. Yeah, very much. Like the phlegm people will know them because... The flemish, yeah? Yeah. The people with loads of flam.

They act exactly like you would expect somebody with loads of flam to act. So they're just kind of dopey and they're a bit like a wet lettuce. And apparently they have really stinky feet. And then those who've got yellow bile are sort of quick to temper. They're angry. They're hot-headed. The melancholic people, it's fairly obvious what they are. Yeah, they're sad.

They're sad. And then what was the other one? The sanguine human. Sanguine. Yeah. Being sanguine is really good. Jolly. Yeah.

And most of the sanguine people are men. Women have more melancholy humours, probably because I'm being like kept inside and not allowed to do anything. But yeah, it goes with kind of types as well. So sanguine people will often have like ginger or blonde hair. They'll be quite kind of retunned and merry. It describes a lot of what the Tudors look like, which is probably not. Oh my God.

All of Tudor England was full of Boris Johnson. Just the royals. All right. So these are ancient Greek ideas. The humoral system, the four humus. Galen was a Roman Greek. And he was building on Hippocrates, who was a Greek. So this is ancient theory that's still in use in the 1500s and 1600s.

Ria, which of the humoral profiles do you think you would be? Especially after that conversation, yellow bile. So we've honed our sense of humors, lull. Now let's look at the various medical professionals. in Renaissance England because there's not just one type of healthcare worker. As today, there are multiple professions. So, Alana, can we start with, I suppose, the obvious ones,

what we would call physicians, which I assume means doctor, but maybe it doesn't? It pretty much does. So the physicians are doctors, but not all doctors are physicians. Oh. Yeah. Whoa. Okay.

Yeah, it's history. It's got to be complicated. I mean, and in the vent diagramming my mind. Yeah. And in the vent diagram, like, the bit of overlap is really small because the physicians, quite a small group because it's really difficult to be a physician. You have to train for about seven years.

You need a university degree. And then you have to get licensed by the College of Physicians. So they get this college in 1518. They managed to get Henry the 8th to say, yeah, you can be a college. This is a brand new guild, a body, to regulate and to administer and say, like, you've been, you're legit. You've done the training. Yeah. And then if you're in the College of Physicians, they have a bit of control over you.

You know, if you do something bad, they can bring you in and say, like, why did you give that lady, like, why? seven ounces of hemlock or something. That's a lot of hemlock. That's too much hemlock. I mean, how much does it, time does it take to get that much hemlock? Anyway, yeah, the physicians are really expensive, so they're only seeing, like, really quite wealthy people. It's about 10 shillings to get a physician to come out to you.

And then as you go on, you get different groups. Like, there's always been different groups, but they start to be more and more formalized because they have to be, because otherwise the physicians are just going to take them all over. And so the physicians are, I suppose, the educated class, right? They have to know Latin and Greek. They've got to know their Galen. They've got to know their humours.

Yes, and that's kind of a problem. Because when they start doing anatomies and stuff, often, like, they're so wedded to Galen. They love Galen so much that they'll be anatomizing people's bodies, but looking in the Galen book and it doesn't match. And they're like, oh God, another freak of nature. How has this happened for the third time in a row? So, okay, so if I'm a moment,

rich person spending my 10 shillings to get the doctor in, the physician comes around. How are they diagnosing me? What are they looking for in terms of symptoms, things they can read? So the physicians are really proud of their diagnostic skills. It's kind of the main thing they have that's different from everybody else. So they'll first, they'll take a really detailed history. They'll ask you, you know, what your symptoms are, but also what you've been eating, what your relationships like, how you sleep, how often you have sex, and they'll write all that stuff down. They also will take your pulse, and I've never quite worked out why they're doing this. They're really proud of their ability to take the pulse and read it, but they never seem to actually diagnose

anybody from it. The thing that they use, and it's more useful to them, is reading urine. So, uroscope, and you'll get flask of your urine, and the physician will have a look at it, and he'll give it a sniff, and he might drink some of it. Whoa. Yeah. Oh, that's normal. I'm sorry, that's normal. The fastest way to tell if someone's diabetic is to take. Exactly, which they call the pissing disease. Really? Yeah. Okay.

Amazing. So they're literally taking the piss? Yep. Okay. Wow. And it means that you don't need the physician right there because if you've gone off to your fancy country house but the physician's in London, where you can send your servant with a long letter and a jar of your wee to the physician.

And I do wonder like how many servants just dropped the wee and then had to like pee in a vessel themselves. Oh, that would be. It would be a classic sitcom episode, wouldn't it? It would. I'm having to refill the jar, and then the doctor's like, I'm so sorry, you've got this rare disease. You're pregnant? Yeah. Well, I mean, okay, you seem very unperturbed about drinking urine.

Like, we shouldn't be grossed out by urine. I mean, people were washing their clothes in it way back. It's a fair point. It's a fair point. I suppose in the 16th century urine is a lot more utilitarian, right? I mean, urine's probably cleaner than a lot of the water sources. Sure. You wash your hair in urine.

You put urine in your makeup. But, listener, please, do not. It's a nice warm. around drinking your own way, just because we said so. Yeah. Stick with chamomile. It looks very similar. Similar temperature.

Okay, so, Alana, so the doctor has diagnosed as quaffed the urine. What are they going to recommend to, they've gargled it? What a lovely vintage? What are they going to recommend? Is it diet, exercise, you know, the classic stuff? Yeah, so about probably 80, 85% of what they recommend is going to be regimen, as they call it. So diet and what you do, but mostly diet. So you want to rebalance whatever humour is out of whack.

Let's say you've got a disease and it's being caused by melancholy. So black bile, which is cold and dry, you're going to want to eat things that are hot and wet. So the foods that are hot, it kind of makes sense. It's the things you think are hot. So red meat, salty foods, cheese, red wine. I mean, it sounds great. More often they're telling people that they have to give up all that stuff, which they don't always like very much.

And the physicians are always complaining about people not taking their advice. Okay. And then presumably there's also things like purging. Yeah, they love a purge. So the three great remedies, as they call them, of the College of Physicians, are bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea. So those aren't remedies. Those are symptoms.

Yeah, very fast and loose with the word great there. But they first will purge you probably with. something to make you vomit or give you diarrhea, which can be like any kind of herbal stuff. Somebody has a purge that they said purges both ends at once. Oh. Yeah. It's lovely. They can also give you really strong stuff like mercury.

One of their best purges is mercury, and they use it for people who've got syphilis. Yeah. So you give the person mercury, or you like smear it on them or you give it to them in a medicine, and then you wrap them up in blankets, and you put them in front of a fire in a room, and you shut all the doors. And the idea, wet them out. Yeah, is to sweat it out. And people sweat so much. And the mercury has such an effect on them that if you do this a lot of times,

like their teeth will fall out. They'll go a weird color from all the mercury inside them. It's a whole thing. And this is a cure. It's crazy how close they are to something that's good for you. Like if you just took away the mercury, it's a sauna, right? It's just a simple sauna treatment. And we've all enjoyed that, you know, we pay to go to,

a spa for the day and stick ourselves wrapped in blankets. But we don't smear ourselves in heavy metal. But we don't smear ourselves in poisonous substances first. So they were so close. Just one tiny detail out. Yes. It probably just like it were. Yeah.

Listen, please do not take any of this as current medical advice. Don't try this at home. Also, can we make a nod to the fact that this feels very much like the male takeover of medicine? Because you know that maybe even 100 years' point. Prior to that, the women were saying, what I'm going to do is I'm going to wrap you in basil. And then I'm going to wrap you in blankets. I'm going to shut the door and we're going to sweat you out with basil.

And that probably, and that would have had a better effect. You know, they were using plants and nature and actually, you know, here's a bit of willow bark. Oh my God, my pain's gone. And then the men came in and went, no, it needs to be red meat for the black bile. Here's some mercury. And it's all gone to pop. We'll get to that later. You're kind of spot on actually with some of this stuff.

You're kind of right that women's sort of roles, I think, were more important than often giving credit. We'll come to that a little later. The other thing I suppose we need to talk about, as well as purging, the bloodletting with leeches. Blackadder was correct? Yeah. They don't use leeches all the time. Sometimes they just cut you and let you bleed into a bowl. It just stab you.

It just depends. Right. Yeah. It's what everyone knows about medicine in the past, right, is they have this image of bloodletting. And it's kind of true. And we have this idea that physicians love letting blood out of people and they want to do it all the time. actually it's kind of driven by the patients. Patients want to get their blood let

because they have the idea that if you let out some of the blood, all the bad stuff's going to go with it, and then you'll make new blood, which is good. Yes, because that's the Galenic theories that you make new blood through the liver, and so you'll just produce new blood and then you'll be fine. Yeah, and some people are getting blood let like every six months, like you would go to the dentist.

They say, whether I feel ill or not, I'm going to let out a bowl of my blood, and that's going to keep me healthy for the summer. Wow. And what about the menstrual cycle? I suppose, you know, if we're talking about these, that's, that's regularly mean that's meant to happen. Yeah, that's nature's bloodletting. They are keen on that. If you are a man, so you're not getting nature's bloodletting, then you might have nosebleeds or haemorrhoids, which pretty much do the same thing. Oh, so haemorrhoids was like a natural. Yeah. Oh, really? Yep. And if you've got a woman and she's not menstruating, like it's a medical emergency.

Sure. And you need to let blood, probably you need to let blood from her ankles. So you draw, the blood down to the right place. Wait, so were we doing that on women in their first trimester because we didn't know they were pregnant? No, if they're like pregnancy age, you're like, okay, you're pregnant. But if it's somebody like postmenopausal, you know, okay, we need to let some blood out of you. Wow, okay. Listen, just the fact they lived that long in the 1500s is impressive.

They do. Everyone thinks they die at like 35, but that's because all the children die. Yeah. If you, like, take out that, then the average age is much higher. I mean, it's not high, but it's much higher. You'd expect to get to your late 50s probably, wouldn't you? Yeah. And there were old people around.

Yeah, were people in their 80s and 90s. That's true. I mean, actually, there were quite a few people that lived to 70s and 80s in the 1800s. Yeah, absolutely. Plenty of elderly people, but unfortunately child mortality was so high. The mean average gets dragged way down. Alana, one famous disease that ravaged England late in this period was the plague, especially the plague of 1665.

Did physicians have any idea how to deal with it? Any protocols? Well, a lot of the physicians just garpa. They just run. Yeah, they're like, we are out of here. But the ones who are still there, they do actually have some pretty good ideas. So they put in place basically social distancing. If somebody in your family might have the plague, then the whole family has to stay inside,

kind of on pain of being very severely told off. They marked your house, didn't they? Yeah. And they say, like, if you're going in a boat, don't sit on the straw that they put in the boat because there might be bugs in it. Or if you have to go around town, don't go down alleyways where there's washing, hanging out. Oh, really?

So this is all like good advice. Yeah, okay. And of course, people don't like social distancing. So there's always complaints about, you know, we told them they all had to stay in the house. And they are technically in the house, but they're just hanging out of the window talking to their neighbours. That's interesting.

So all of those things suggest that they thought it was communicated through touch rather than what it was what someone was infected which was through the air. They didn't really know. They knew that it was passing from person to person somehow. Sometimes they thought it was through the air,

through myasma, which is like bad air. So bad smelling air they believed had naturally occurring disease, right? Yeah. That's why those masks with the big noses, the big hooked noses that physicians would wear, which were quite scary. But at the end of the nose,

they put a little bouquet so that they could not. So if they went to, ever wear them. Yeah, it's an iconic image. It's the thing that everyone thinks of as like the famous plague Dr. Mask. Yeah, it's more of a thing in Italy. They don't really do it in England. And therefore, Edinburgh, because of the strong connections between Italy and Scotland. So Italy and Scotland had a great relationship going on before the English came in, well, and 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 is 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. But possible. But, yeah, technically possible.

And they think now some people had a genetic mutation, which makes them a bit more likely to survive. Okay. 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 neighbours, like, 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, okay. Yeah, or the dissolved flesh of snakes. That's also good. Gensett are still doing that today. Yeah, yeah. 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 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 place. I see the movie now, the men who stare at Toad. I mean, it's 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 it's powdered. So we've got amphibium-based plague cures where you get a furious toad that dies of sheer rage and then you powder it, fine, dissolve snakes and emeralds on gemstones.

Fabulous, that's George Thompson. We do have scientific progress. You know, 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. Yes, he is a clever chap. Before this point, you talked about Galen and Blood and the Galenic Thurian. theory of blood is that you make blood mostly in your liver and then the heart like 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. So he ties off their arm. And then he looks at what happens to the arm. And if you have the ligature really tight, the arm will go cold. 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 around and around the body. So this is the circulatory system. He figures out that the heart pumps blood around the body. And this is... He's not completely like we would understand it now, but he's pretty close.

Sure, he gets the principle of it. And 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 is 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 two bodies. So are we post 1665 now? With Harvey? Yeah, just before a little bit before.

Yeah, I think it's 1640s and 50s, I think. The other person we need to talk about Christopher Wren. Renn. Do you know the name, Christopher Wren? Yes, but not in the context of medicine. Oh, that was his first great love. Was that his first great love? And he just turned himself.

He dabbled in cathedrals. He dabbled in cathedrals. Yeah, I could do you a cathedral. Yeah, 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. Okay, all right. I'm trying to speak for the every man here. You know, I'm a podcast. I'm a wrestler. I'm a, you know, no, no, he's a doctor and an architect and 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 it 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. She's like, what happens if you give them opium or wine, you know, these various things? Who is he doing this on?

Just not volunteers, surely. Volunteers is a strong word. Patients he'd found, I guess. Yeah, and dogs. And dogs and animals, isn't it? Oh, 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 doing the, he 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, But they almost immediately dismiss that idea and instead go down the avenue of what happens if I put, like, the blood of a timid dog into a fierce dog, just make that dog more tame. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Or if I put like 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 they want to do it on a human. And they eventually managed to get hold of this human.

They 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, okay. Yeah. He's supposedly a bit mad. but mostly I think he just needs money. Okay. So they give him, I think they give him maybe like 30 shillings. Had he not heard of, oh, I guess he couldn't really just do a sperm donation to a bank.

No, that's how they do it now. No blood donors, yeah, 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. Right. 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. There you go, thanks you. Only you.

Sorry. All right, well, I've got another one now. Let's move on from the bar. Let's go for the barbers 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 want a 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.

Was 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? Ah, it's good. They're just flowing. I'm loving it. It starts off with the barbers, and for ages they're called the company of barbers surgeons,

because the barbers back in medieval times... They sung lovely songs, didn't they? Can you imagine? Four part armies 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.

So 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 their company of barbers surgeons in 1534. So there's this picture of Henry VIII's 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're designed, 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 a surgery, right? 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 do mastectomies. Oh, really? Yeah. It's horrible. I mean, hernias, fistulas, cataracts, so external surgeries, I suppose. Yeah, quite a lot of posturrect surgery. Oh, we know what that is.

Oh, no. Oh, they're just plucking that out, aren't they? And kidney 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 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, of,

fake, false legs, false eyes, of false noses, ears stitched to hats, which I love. So you put the hat down and suddenly you've got ears attached, which is amazing. We should bring those back. I'm an elf. But we need to move on to a different discipline, which is the apocothery. 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.

Okay. Because... Did you say those two words again? Pepperers and spices. I love to be like cameras. Port pepper and spices. Oh, wow. Pepperers and spices.

Yeah, and they basically have pharmacists. What they're supposed to do is fill the prescriptions that the physician's right. What 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 it? We know, it's like one for every 2,000 people. And this is a big city.

Yeah. So there's a lot of apothecary. Apothecaries? How are we pronouncing it? Apothecary. Yeah, 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. Tremendously 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 Colpepper, who is amazing, does work with the poor, often does incredibly sort of 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. Cold Pepper's Herbal. Coal Peppers 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 play and everything's amazing. 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 Cole Pepper coincidentally and he becomes an apothecary? Or does he come from a long line of pepperers? No, he's from a long line of Vickers. Oh, really? But he's like, my name is Culpeper. I must pepper. I must have. 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 dodgy quacks. I'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. Okay. So does the stroke or do some kind of something that calms the nervous system like literally stroking, they don't realize that that's what they're doing by calming people down? It's a good guess. I'm very, very elegantly put.

Well 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, that's all. Oh, my gosh. So it's sort of massage or is it just sort of, it's more... Fetary stroking. It's Irish rakey. 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 quack salver, which is a Dutch word for... somebody who sells ointments by boasting about their medical credentials. Right, okay. So someone with a bit of kind of a little bit of showmanship, Rasmataz, buying my staff, it'll cure you.

What was the Dutch word? Quacksalva. So 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 women were hugely involved in healthcare. I suspect they were hugely involved in Coalpeper's herbal.

Maybe. Yeah, I mean, a lot of. what Culper puts in the herbal. He's just cribbed from women. Okay. Yeah. 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. And they do extraordinary medicine. They do all the kind of basically giving you a hot toddy type medicine. Okay. 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 of my head, I picture the noble woman living in a manner. 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 bored witless. And they're clever and they're quite well educated. So they're basically. Yeah, exactly.

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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And it's really, really popular and she ends up publishing loads of these. So it's her. and Culpepper are sort of, the kind of 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 copy right now, is there? AI companies, boo. Anyway, sorry. A lot of the medicines appear across, like, numerous of these texts. Okay. Rea, important question. What was Cockwater? 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 or...

No, it's spelled C-O-C-K. It's spelled cockwater. I tried to lift this program 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? Cockwater is cural 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 rink.

cow and ambergris. An 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. Yeah.

We'll wash up on the beach. Yeah, and it's for fevers and things. Okay. Oh, so it's like cowpole. 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 red. Red is blood. What was the recipe? Chicken? Milk from a red cow. Yeah. Raisins.

Yeah. An ambergris. Another one, of course. 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 dried raisins so that you can transport them. Shipping them in. You're 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. Puppy 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 program, 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 a, healthcare and medicine. Does the midwifery world have a college? Are they official physicians?

You know, 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. And 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. So the baby's got his arm stuck the wrong way or... Breach birth and that sort of thing. Yeah. Okay.

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. Okay. 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. Which of those not true? I'm going to go with number three umbilical cord of penis length because you could just eyeball that because I know the womb traveling around your body that was a thing. They were just like, come back, come back, come back down. They would 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 a womb continued to live after. Yeah. And that one I'm going to say I still think some people in the US believe because they do not see us as people. they see us as walking incubators. So 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, isn't it? I can't argue with the 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. Do we get a sense here of male medicine muscling in on midwifery? Yeah, the worst defenders of 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.

Actually, once they kind of give up on the whole project after about 100 years, it turns out what they have is the forceps. Oh, 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 if you, the depths of depravity, they're just, it's angering.

It really is. So one family controlled the four-step industry. Yep. And then eventually they found them under the floorboards of this guy's house. He'd buried them there to keep them safe. It's a family secret. Oh, goodness, mate. So men sort of muscled in and invented new technology or so on.

And midwifery itself. And we haven't really changed the design of forceups. No. You know, they were, so I've had a forceup delivery. My 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, and I, you know, 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, kids 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 foreps, what came before that? Before that, if the baby got really stuck, there was basically nothing you could do. And 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? Have midwives ever? I mean, of course they've 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. It wasn't actually legally required for midwives to have training until 1902. Wow. Yeah. After Queen Victoria? Yeah. Goodness, me. Extraordinary. Okay. So the company of surgeons, the company of physicians was 1518 and 1902 for the company of midwives. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. Ria, we've been on quite a journey. I think that's 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. They've been walking around after childbirth.

There's no need to regulate this. Then the Chamberlain's 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, Rhea? It's incredible. Who would you have trusted with your healthcare in this period if you were there back then? Would you have gone with the physicians? Oh, I'm going with Jane Sharp.

Yeah, probably wise. Jane Sharp, who knows what a breach birth looks like. I'm like, I trust you. Maybe the noble woman in the area as well. Hannah Wully, yeah, or maybe. But Hannah Wully wasn't noble. No, she wasn't. But I'll trust Hannah Wully too.

Fair enough. But you're not going with the Chamberlains. I'm very much not going with the Chamberlains. Okay. The nuance window! Okay, 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 sit while we listen? You may, you may. Okay. Alana, you've got two minutes. Off you go. Okay.

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. So 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, recognises 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 centres 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, Guy, Westminster. They're all produced during that period. So 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 or 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 networks. 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 B.A. 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 monastery. So 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, health care'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 parishers literally kicking out their disabled and going go to the next parish? Yeah, that's where we get passports from because it's the past 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. Wow. Huh. So what do you know now?

Well, it's time now for the Sir, 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've 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?

The 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.

Coffing it. Cawthing. A cup of coffee. Yeah. Question three. Which animal's blood did Richard Lowa 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-bedlam volunteer. Paid volunteer, yes. Whereas in France, they did it with calves.

Yes. 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, well, hang on a second. We started way back at the beginning with all physicians are doctors but not all doctors are physicians. 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. Also, as you said, there were like 1 to 2,000 so there's multiple answers to this question.

I'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 me. That was more Bram Stoker. Yeah, I apologize to all of Ireland. The stroker. Question six, what was cock water? Not what I said it was. It was basically cream of chicken soup. Yeah, to put some, yeah, 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, 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, that's... Because it's absolutely horrifying, isn't it? Yes, he could have fractures. But he survived. He did. Mestectomies two. Herni is fist, amputings.

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 very commercial remedy book, which probably overlapped a lot with Culpeper'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. They were hysterical. Your womb was too high in your body. What the word comes from. Hysteria, 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. Coal peppers 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 was a good. It was the first dog. Yeah. But, I mean, very, very impressive. You wouldn't put it past them. No. Thank you so much for Ria. And listener, if you want more from Ria,

check out our episodes on Chungi Sal, 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 Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear. New episodes, It's 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. But I just like to say huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we had the amazing Dr. Alana Scusse from the University of Reading. Thank you, Alana. Thank you, Alana. Pleasure to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant Ria Lina. Dr. Ria Lina. Thank you, Ria. Pleasure, as always.

See me afterwards for that round. Oh, thank you. Puppie water, is it? Oh, no. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we restore another language. historical topic back to full health. But for now, I'm off to go and launch my new wellness brand. Leaches for Life!

I'm going to be rich. Bye! You'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 Noghuse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey, and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Noghous,

and our executive editor was Philip Sellers. Hi, 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. say, I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast.