At least twice, in pop culture, I’ve seen an immortal character at a renaissance fair or some similar event comment that it lacked verisimilitude, one point of which is huge tumors on people. Is this just a convenient gag, or was this really a common thing back then? If so, why not so much now? Even with better medical care, if they were that common at one point, you’d think they’d still be a relatively normal sight.
Judging by contemporary painting, no, it was not common to see people with huge tumors. Check out crowd scenes in the paintings of Brueghel, Hogarth, etc.: even when they’re showing some pretty raffish and/or impoverished people, if they’re going about their business out in public, they’re mostly not catastrophically deformed or diseased.
There was one picture collection made by a drug company showing peculiarities in the features of people depicted in paintings, implying a certain illness or abnormality… googling… here’s one I remember:
The joints in the fingers of the youth by Boticelli implies a common type of joint inflamation.
http://www.florentine-persona.com/Images/Botticelli_Portr_young_man_1483_brownjerkin_thumb.jpg
Oliver Cromwell who told his painter, “Paint me, warts and all.”
It wouldn’t be common, but also if it happened it would not be treated. Note that they wouldn’t have to be cancers: goiter produces a tumor on the throat that can be truly splendiferous, and keloid scars can look like tumors.
I know a few people with very large facial deformities (they’re not tumors, in their cases), which are untreated because the risks posed by the multiple surgeries are considered too high. There have been times and cultures in which such a person would never be seen in public, but then, neither would someone who couldn’t walk at all.
As the diego hints at, most portraits wouldn’t be “warts and all”: something like the Habsburg mouth which is basically proof that your Daddy was your Daddy (well, except when Mommy was already Daddy’s cousin on three sides, in which case the mouth didn’t prove anything) would get painted, but scars, warts and deformities usually wouldn’t.
True for portraits, but not necessarily for crowd scenes in the work of realistic painters, especially satirical ones like Hogarth, where the individual figures are not always depicted flatteringly, to say the least.
Leprosy was also widespread in medieval Europe, and will often cause facial skin lesions, sometimes in the form of nodules.
Yeah, but when someone simply didn’t leave the house, that someone wouldn’t be in a crowd figure.
How many figures with Down’s do you see in those crowd scenes?
Smallpox was also common and left, if not scars that would necessarily show up in a painted crowd scene, certainly ones that would be obvious when wandering the streets in person.
Well anybody that had any facial skin cancers were certainly walking around disfigured but I don’t know how common it would have been, its not like tanning was a big thing back then.
Yeah, but working out in a field for umpteen hours every day during the summer was pretty popular amongst the peasantry.
True, but except for the upper classes I don’t know how many families could support a person who couldn’t work or beg. Also, people with Down Syndrome often have other genetic defects and wouldn’t survive into adulthood. Pictures of beggars I would expect to have visible disfigurements, either real or cultivated (or both). “Regular” people might have scrofulous tumors (the King’s Evil) or goiter or things like that.
Regards,
Shodan
Based on them spent in areas that currently don’t have much access to medical care, I don’t remember “tumors” as being particularly prominent. I think I noticed rickets, polio and leperosy the most, followed by major skin infections. Tumors are there, I’m sure, but they aren’t likely to be what you’d notice.
People with huge cancerous tumors would likely be too sick to walk around, wouldn’t they?
Large buboes would be somewhat common during time of bubonic plague, I suppose.
95% of people are immune to leprosy.
There is however, a big difference between “access to modern medical care is limited” and “the necessary medical care does not exist”.
To the OP, removing tumors as a surgical practice is pretty old. An excellent article on the history of cancer and its treatments.
The Summoner in The Canterbury Tales was pretty awful to look at, bad enough to frighten children.
Translation:
Original
A somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,
For saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake and piled berd.
Of his visage children were aferd.
Ther nas quyk-silver, lytarge, ne brymstoon,
Boras, ceruce, ne oille of tartre noon;
Ne oynement that wolde clense and byte,
That hym myghte helpen of his whelkes white,
Nor of the knobbes sittynge on his chekes.
When you spent time living in dirt-floored huts and stuff, did you find that people had much acne? Did they do much face-washing?
Did you do much face-washing? Did you have acne flare-ups?
Not a lot of acne, in particular. Lots of ringworm, scabies, staph infections and rashes of various origin though, especially with kids.
I lived in a Muslim area, so plenty of face washing.
There’s a museum of immigration in my city, and its main room has a huge assortment of photographs from the beginning of photography to the present; in some, the people are identified, and in others, they are not. When I was there a while back, one of the pictures was of two preschool-aged siblings, and the baby did indeed have Down Syndrome. It’s the first time I ever saw someone like that in an old photograph.
Until the 1950s, people with Down Syndrome usually had very short life expectancies because of heart and intestinal defects, and other health issues, on top of many parents not very aggressively keeping the children alive, if not outright killing them which still happens in many Third World areas.