Rickets and vitamin D deficiency-related bone problems are back. Because of the increased awareness of skin cancer and other skin damage, people are using sunscreen and covering up. This is good for preventing skin cancer, but it doesn’t allow for the production of vitamin D. Throw in consumption of nut milks, which may or may not be fortified with calcium and vitamin D, over cow’s milk, which has those things naturally, and more people have vitamin D deficiency than before, when people sunbathed or played outside and drank milk at every meal.
As a hijack, I had a HUGE vitamin D problem (like, my levels were half of the low side of acceptable). My doctor told me that if I was only going for a walk around the block, or out for 30 minutes or shorter, don’t bother covering up. If I’m going to be outside for longer than that, I should do the sunscreen-and-burka routine. I’ve been doing that and my levels are now fine.
Seriously? You think going to the gym is how people got exercise?
The vacuum cleaner is a relatively modern invention, even compared to the relatives you mention. Prior to vacuum cleaners, you moved the furniture, picked up the carpet, carried it outside, beat the crap out of it with a stick for a few hours, carried it back in and put the furniture back.
You scrubbed the laundry against a wash board, by hand.
Then you had to start kneading the dough so there was bread for dinner.
All of this was typical housewife work and most did not have someone to do it for them.
As Wendell Wagner notes, it’s very unlikely that the name of the procedure derives from Caesar; Julius certainly wasn’t born that way since the procedure was only performed in the first century BC when the mother died during childbirth; Caesar’s mother Aurelia certainly didn’t die in childbirth and actually outlived him.
It’s also not mentioned or alluded to in the play Julius Caesar. Rather Shakespeare alludes to the procedure in MacBeth; the witches prophesy that “none of woman born shall harm MacBeth,” and MacBeth’s eventual killer MacDuff reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”
I have read that the first known cesarean section where mother and baby both survived was performed by a butcher! :eek: His wife had labored so long that she had lapsed into a coma, so he got out a knife and removed the baby, who went on to live a normal life, and then took out her reproductive organs so she would not go through that again. This was IIRC in the 1500s.
His name was Jakob Nufer, but the story is not attested until 82 years later (and thus almost certainly apocryphal). There’s also no chance that any woman could have survived a hysterectomy without knowledge of suturing and cauterization.
The premise to As I lay Dying. And it happened to Abe Lincoln’s mom, she died, his dad remarried with a great stepmom for Abe. ON the flipside, Thomas Jefferson’s wife died after giving birth to her sixth child at the age of 33, historians say probably from undiagnosed diabetes. Martha Jefferson made him promise to never remarry perhaps due to the nightmarish stepmothers she had to deal with…For Thomas that meant ok to have mistresses such as Ms Hemings.
I am reminded of a scene from the Tudors where some maids thought heck Princess Elizabeth will go on to marry and die from childbirth. As we all know Queen Elizabeth I survived to age 69 because she didn’t get preggers.
I thought Kate Middleton was nuts when she got pregnant with Charlotte, because she had hyperemesis with George - and Charlotte too, for that matter." She’d REALLY be crazy to voluntarily go through that a third time IMNSHO, which makes me even more skeptical than usually about all those tabloid reports that she’s PG yet again.
I have a sister who, during both her pregnancies, had worse hyperemesis than Kate did - we’re talking multiple hospitalizations and lots of IV’s to prevent serious dehydration. It took about a year and a half to get her to quite talking about and give up the notion of having child #3.
My great-grandmother was a laundress; she was the first one to offer a pick-up-and-delivery service in Barcelona, c. 1910 (the others would do the laundry on site). Her daughter has had a washing machine for 48 years: the washing machine drains into the wash-basin she’s always refused to remove. A frequent complaint from the family used to be “it takes her so long to decide to do laundry, you’d think it’s still by hand!”; she would wait until people were completely out of clean clothes to do laundry, at which point she’d complain that the machine was “too small!”
You can tell a house is up for sale as the result of the death of someone from that generation because there is one of those basins in place.
I have a big double sink, made of poured concrete, in the basement. The washer drains into it. I suppose I could use it as a laundry sink. But I love it. It can be handy to have a very large sink.
I think PPD is one of those ways women suffer a lot less now, due to the advances in medication. If the “baby blues” stick around for any length of time, medication is likely to help.
These have the washboard built-in. Google images lavadero brings up a bunch (this page is from a current vendor) before going into other types of sinks.
Huh, that’s not what I have, but mine was clearly inspired by those. It looks just the same, except instead of the washboard, there’s a straight line from the protruding front top edge to the front bottom edge. It’s extremely useful for things like washing a litter box or leaving a large wet item to drain and dry.