Minor non-fatal disease which changed history

[Little_Nemo]

@Mijin

Just because serious illnesses were more common, does not mean that everyday coughs and colds or headaches didn’t happen. And in a time when genuinely incapacitating infections, chronic disease and injuries from dangerous manual labor were commonplace, no doubt people had to work through the small shit. Let alone during a war.

On the subject of injuries from dangerous manual labor, I read something interesting. There was a study about how people died and they found something unexpected. The percentage of people who died from accidents remained constant over a period going back to the fourteenth century. Your odds of dying from other causes would go up and down but the odds that you would died in an accident remained steady.

On the surface this makes no sense. It would seem that if the odds of other causes changed it would be reflected in the accidental death rate. if fewer people were dying from infections, for example, that should mean more of them would live to have fatal accidents. And the potential for accidental deaths would appear to have increased; we now have cars and electricity and industrial machines that can kill us in ways our ancestors never faced. But somehow the death rate remains the same.

The theory offered was that accidents are a much more social phenomena than we consciously realize. We hear about other people dying in accidents and we unconsciously modify our behavior. If we hear about a lot of accidental deaths, we start being more careful and begin using safety features. And if we don’t hear about accidental deaths, we become less careful and take more risks. The result is the overall accidental death rate maintains an equilibrium.

[griffin1977]

@Mijin

Just because serious illnesses were more common, does not mean that everyday coughs and colds or headaches didn’t happen. And in a time when genuinely incapacitating infections, chronic disease and injuries from dangerous manual labor were commonplace, no doubt people had to work through the small shit. Let alone during a war.
Plus of course even if someone thought some symptom was suggestive of a more serious illness coming, what difference would it make? Our ability to do anything about things like bacterial infections has been pretty limited until relatively recently.

Going to bed and making sure you are properly fed was the state of the art of treating infection until the invention of antibiotics. And was definitely practiced.

My point wasn’t that people in pre-modern times never got regular colds and sniffles, its that at he onset you had no way of knowing if this was a regular cold or something that would bring you to death’s door. So I am sure the elites, who had the option of taking a couple of days off and being fed chicken soup, would have been more likely to do so than someone in the same situation today.

[Nava]

@md2000

Henry VIII decided a divorce was in order when his wife, the Spanish princess, had multiple miscarriages (and one daughter, Mary). While miscarriages certainly aren’t trivial, poor fertility was a non-fatal condition that severely altered the trajectory of English history.

If we’re counting fertility issues, Henry II “the Impotent” of Castille had a bit of a problem and a first wife who didn’t like being called sterile when she was, in fact, still virgo intacta. The contested paternity of Juana “la Beltraneja”, daughter of his second wife, helped put Isabel I on the throne.

@DrCube

Both William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died of what would today probably be considered minor non-fatal diseases. Harrison of pneumonia and Taylor of gastroenteritis.

Both are still deadly, specially on fragile patients (such as the very young and the very old) or if treatment starts too late (such as for the very macho). I’ve known people hospitalized for both of them, including ICU cases; one of the gastrenteritis patients getting hospitalized was in his early 30s and had a really bad case of dehydration by the time he was brought to the hospital, he decided to ask a colleague to do so when he realized he was half-passing out.

[MikeS]

If you count the Old Testament as historical, then there’s the “plague of hemorrhoids” that convinced the Philistines to return the Ark of the Covenant to the Jews.

[Mijin]

@griffin1977

My point wasn’t that people in pre-modern times never got regular colds and sniffles, its that at he onset you had no way of knowing if this was a regular cold or something that would bring you to death’s door. So I am sure the elites, who had the option of taking a couple of days off and being fed chicken soup, would have been more likely to do so than someone in the same situation today.

But the “elites” would have had regular colds and sniffles and more often suffered more serious infections like typhus or cholera.
If they really took sickies for minor sniffles more often than we do, then they’d need to be off work a substantial proportion of the time.

At this point I’d like to throw “cite” at you for your claims, but we both know we can’t really verify this one way or the other. I just think the idea that people in the past often having to bear more serious disease and face a much shorter lifespan, yet going to rest up every time they have a minor cold, is implausible on its face.

[asahi]

@kunilou

In 1960, Richard Nixon developed an infected knee and was sidelined for two weeks. When he resumed campaigning he had lost weight and looked generally unhealthy. He hadn’t yet fully recovered when he appeared in the first televised debate against Kennedy. It may not be the only reason he looked bad in that debate, but compare photos of Nixon and Kennedy at the debate vs. this photo taken less than two months later.

I heard a radio interview years ago in which someone claimed that JFK was taking all kinds of wild pain meds (probably opioids) for Addison’s disease and that he would have moments in which he flutter in and out mentally, oscillating between lucidity and bursts of bellicosity. Have no idea if it’s true, but he seemed convincing anyway. This is tangential but partially relevant because it’s possible that one of his outbursts could have changed history in October 1962 (if we accept this character sketch, that is)

[igor_frankensteen]

I’m not a big fan of this kind of thinking, myself. I.e., the whole “if not for mundane thing X, we’d all be aeriopterixes” or some such.

The thing is, as I’ve studied the past, and how we all came to be who and what we are, I’ve yet to come across any significant changes OR stabilities in the world which were NOT dependent on THOUSANDS of small elements.

In addition, in order to predict what MIGHT have happened instead, is vastly more complex than anyone who indulges in this sort of whimsical entertainment ever seems to appreciate. Take Rommel in North Africa as an example. Since, by the time of el Alamein, the Germans were outnumbered something like ten to one by the British, and were all but ignored when it came to supplies by the German high command, how sick or well Rommel was, is unlikely to have made a difference. And since the overall circumstances of the times, is what gets a given candidate elected, rather than tiny details, deciding for more than the absurdity of it all to blame only ONE small element, is rather illogical.

Take the thing about the Spanish guy and his chair, for example. Or Hilary Clinton and the FBI announcement by Comey. Had the general public not ALREADY had a very strong negative opinion about each person, the smaller element involved, wouldn’t have had any significant effect.

And Napoleon at Waterloo wasn’t a triumph of luck either, no matter how bad Napoleon may have felt that day. He had lost plenty of battles before that one. He wasn’t MAGIC, after all. And his forces too, were outnumbered, AND, by that time, the rest of the generals on the field had learned the lesson that they had to move fast to defeat Napoleon’s battles of maneuver. If anything, Napoleon lost at Waterloo, precisely because he had won so many other battles, that everyone was determined to destroy him as fast as they could.

[griffin1977]

@igor_frankensteen

I’m not a big fan of this kind of thinking, myself. I.e., the whole “if not for mundane thing X, we’d all be aeriopterixes” or some such.

The thing is, as I’ve studied the past, and how we all came to be who and what we are, I’ve yet to come across any significant changes OR stabilities in the world which were NOT dependent on THOUSANDS of small elements.

In addition, in order to predict what MIGHT have happened instead, is vastly more complex than anyone who indulges in this sort of whimsical entertainment ever seems to appreciate. Take Rommel in North Africa as an example. Since, by the time of el Alamein, the Germans were outnumbered something like ten to one by the British, and were all but ignored when it came to supplies by the German high command, how sick or well Rommel was, is unlikely to have made a difference. And since the overall circumstances of the times, is what gets a given candidate elected, rather than tiny details, deciding for more than the absurdity of it all to blame only ONE small element, is rather illogical.

Take the thing about the Spanish guy and his chair, for example. Or Hilary Clinton and the FBI announcement by Comey. Had the general public not ALREADY had a very strong negative opinion about each person, the smaller element involved, wouldn’t have had any significant effect.

And Napoleon at Waterloo wasn’t a triumph of luck either, no matter how bad Napoleon may have felt that day. He had lost plenty of battles before that one. He wasn’t MAGIC, after all. And his forces too, were outnumbered, AND, by that time, the rest of the generals on the field had learned the lesson that they had to move fast to defeat Napoleon’s battles of maneuver. If anything, Napoleon lost at Waterloo, precisely because he had won so many other battles, that everyone was determined to destroy him as fast as they could.

While that is clearly true in a lot of cases (and the idea of a “great man” changing history is very unpopular among historians), there are clearly cases where a single the actions of a single individual, or a single event, did drastically alter the course of history.

The Augustus/Octavian example I gave above for example. While the Roman Republic was clearly doomed, regardless of who won the struggles around its collapse, Augustus was a far more capable administrator than his opponents (and lived long enough, despite his illnesses, to ensure a long period of stability while his reforms took effect). It is perfectly reasonable to say that if he’d lost one of his battles against Mark Anthony (a much more talented general, but a shit show of an administrator), the Roman empire would not have endured as long as it did.