Lots of people have mentioned clothes, particulary that yours would be fantastic, but no ones mentioned shoes. If you’re wearing boots, hiking boots, tennis shoes, etc. you’re going to be the most finely shod man in Europe.
Now you wouldn’t have any native rubber, but even with little to no experience, I’d be most of us could cobble up a decent pair of cowboy boots or an improved moccasin. Unlike more ambitious inventions like type and firearms, great boots would instantly be in high demand. These folk would understand good and bad footwear.
well, assuming I survive the inital jump, don’t starve or get burned out of hand, I’m going to try and set up a medical practice. It will be hard to get started, but if I’m lucky enough to get something going, wound hygiene and isolation techniques should make me rich. I think I might be able to conjure up a small pox inoculation as well. Again, achieving a critical mass of legitimacy will be hard and I’ll have to be lucky, but it could be done.
Everyone suggesting that doctoring with modern hygiene would get them appreciated is delusional. Do people today automatically recognize good medicine from bad? If that were so, we wouldn’t have faith healers and homeopaths and bad chiropractors. My mother’s a doctor and she reports that people invariably prefer the worst doctor in town to the best because the best doctor is unlikely to have the best bedside manner while bedside manner is all the worst doctor has to get by on.
Even with the best in hygiene and sterile technique the 11th century has to offer, there’s still a pretty good chance your first patient dies and you’re immediately regarded as a charlatan. Even if your first patient recovers beautifully, you’ve only done what was expected, but without using any of the “right” techniques. When your second or fifth of twentieth patient dies, the local physician will declare that if he’d been bled properly and treated with mercury and lead sugar instead of being washed like a pig by some untrained foreigner they’d have been fine. And you will be tarred, feathered and run out of town.
I can spin wool, weave, and sew clothes, and would be a passable midwife, but probably what I’m best at would be training and breeding animals = herding dogs, breaking and training horses, vetting farm animals. I wouldn’t be trying for a kingdom, just a good old boy to set up a farm.
What about electricity? Knowledge of the principal of electromagnetic induction could take you a long way. You’d need some lodestones, metal wire, and a mechanical means of moving them past each other.
I don’t know what practical purpose it could serve. Electroplating maybe, or crude telegraph. The most important application, the electric light, would probably be beyond the materials technology of the era though. Edison experimented with thousands of filament materials before discovering the answer was tungsten, so you are ahead of the game in that respect, but where to get it? You can’t just tell the blacksmith, “bring me some tungsten”.
As far as developing steam power, I doubt the imprecise metalwork of the age would permit it.
Also, I would want to get with the village blacksmith. Teach him about lost wax casting. To do anything technological, you need to be able to mass produce identical metal parts. Even just for making something as prosaic as nails, you could improve quality and slash costs.
Also, I am reminded of the economists challenge, could you build a pencil? Given the rest of your lifetime, you could not. So many steps. Mining ore to make the steel collar that holds the eraser, smelting the ore, forming the collar, where do you get rubber for the eraser, so you have to build a ship to sail to where rubber is indigenous, etc.
Pace what a lot have said here, I don’t think food would be that hard to come by. I think there are a few parts of Europe that have lower populations now than in the Middle Ages, but England, at least, was quite agrarian, more wild than today, & didn’t have a megalopolis in the south. In a settlement, you could beg or earn bread, vegetables, even meat, perhaps more easily than your counterpart thrown a thousand years forward to today.
Well, maybe not in winter.
As for disease, I’m an American inoculated against a range of things from mumps to typhoid fever, & descended from survivors of the Black Plague. I’d be in better shape than the hapless denizens of that era.
_
What could I teach? Beats me. Maybe I’d start an English form of unarmed combat, based on my scant knowledge of karate principles: “Wax on, wax off!”
:cough: Actually, the recent rise in height in the West is partly a correction from the stunted growth of many in the 19th Century. Pollution & poor access to food in industrial cities had an effect. OTOH, Charlemagne was well over 6 feet tall. Royals were not undernourished as a rule, & self-sufficient farmer-hunters can get pretty big. So… you might by taken for nobility in some places, or just a handsome foreigner.
I agree. There are still plenty of places where people have access to Western medicine and prefer to go to the local traditional healers. And that is with today’s large scale public education campaigns. Even in America we have our anti-vaccination people.
The thing that gets people to begin to accept medical principles is antibiotic injections. They provide a nearly instant and very noticeable effects. Only then can you get a few people to start accepting the other stuff.
Don’t think there wasn’t some idea of basic sanitation. People didn’t know germs were what made you sick, but they probably knew drinking straight water could make you sick. Just about every society has a tea or alcohol culture that solves this problem. The trick is that fuel to heat water is expensive. In ancient cultures it would be analogous to the fuel for our cars- it can be a large chunk of your income/energy output to acquire it. As populations rise and people get closer to each other, the price of fuel goes up and the other time-honored traditional sanitation techniques (like outhouses) stop working in close quarters.
I think you’re vastly overestimating the state of medicine at the time. Given the techniques at the time, I believe people would not expect a seriously ill or wounded person (it would have to be serious in order to warrant a trip to the docs) to survive, regardless of the competence (or not) of the physician. The fact that you had surviving patients at all would be seen as evidence that what you were doing was working. You may not get instant results, but in the long run you’d get a lot more surviving patients than the local quack.
Let’s say, against all odds, the skilled application of crystals actually does cure terminal lung cancer in 25% of patients, whereas with modern medicine it can be cured 5% of the time. And someone comes to your town who knows this technique. The problem is that you live in an area where clinical trials, peer review and media doesn’t exist. It’s just you, this guy and your regular doctors.
What would it really take for you to believe the crystal guy?
First off, you aren’t going to want your sick loved ones to go without standard care. Would you ever trust some new bizarre technique over the ones that you have used for centuries. So you’d have a tough time getting even one person to try it. You might be able to get someone who would try both, but then any success would be attributed to the traditional medicine.
And then when it does work, the automatic assumption is that the disease wasn’t really as bad as it seemed. People will just think “oh, he wasn’t that sick after all.” Wouldn’t you do that if crystals seemed to cure your loved one? And if the guy dies, you are going to take that as proof that the technique does’t work.
Of course the opposite isn’t true. When modern medicine cures the guy, it is always going to be directly attributed to the power of modern medicine. When it fails, it is always going to be attributed to the idea that the disease is too strong.
So how long would it take you to notice the crystal guy was actually curing people? Knowing myself, it’d probably take decades.
I completely agree with you; rolling into town mouthing off about bacteria, sterilisation, inoculation and other ideas that are familiar to us would get you funny looks at best. This is assuming, however, that you try and ‘rock the boat’, so to speak, and immediately espouse the benefits of our high-tech space medicine. As we’ve established, rocking the boat isn’t the best idea when you don’t speak the language, have no currency, food and are dressed in a completely alien manner.
Hence why, with a basic knowledge of Latin, you could pass yourself off as a lost foreign clergyman get yourself put up in a monastery (if you’re not religious - fake it) and establish yourself as a monastic healer and work within the system:
Therefore, you’d have access to food, clothes and shelter for your services. Pre-Norman invasion is a little early for established Monastic hospitals, but it wouldn’t seem strange painted in the light of healing in the name of Christian duty (and would likely earn you more Brownie points than trying to set yourself up as a profit-making rival to whichever folk healers and the like were around locally). You’re not going to revolutionise medical practices (unless you start doing a lot better than expected and people start actively poking their noses in what you are actually doing), but as you point out, this is unlikely to happen anyway for a variety of reasons.
Compare the case of our hapless time traveler to that of Cabeca de Vaca. Like us, he was unexpectedly stranded in a completely foreign land (a sixteenth century Spaniard stranded on the Texas coast). He could not speak the language, appears strange to the locals and has no possessions. Like our time traveler, the practice of medicine was shamanistic, ritualistic and localised. Like our time traveler, de Vaca considers himself to be more educated than the locals - he is a treasurer in post-Renaissance Europe. Like our time traveler (in my case), he has altruistic aims and hopes to use his European understanding of medicine to help the locals. He manages to gain himself a reputation as a great healer;
Note that in this case de Vaca also seeks to work within the system, so to speak.
Fair enough. It does seem plausible that you could find a place within an existing system and at least have steady work. Then you could slowly begin to introduce new techniques. I guess I was just imagining an “I’m going to teach them open heart surgery!!!” situation.
About the 4th century BC; they were well-known by 1000 AD but not very popular with The People In Charge because, well, they were the Pre-Gunpowder version of an AK-47 (in that they required almost no training to use, were relatively easy to make, and very effective at short range.)
Well being part Inuit and mild southern English winters I’d start heading south. I could survive in the woods while getting used to society.
The first thing I’d do is wow them with my jeans. There’s a reason they’re so common these days. They’re alot more durable then standard pants, and certainly more durable then anything they had then. How many things then would have been as comfortable as a cotton t-shirt? They wouldn’t of had anything like it. Especially the precision of machine stitching. I’d steal a local pair of pants and shirt to save wear and tear on my modern clothes. They’re my ticket for survival.
Just possessing these items combined with my odd language would mark me as someone distinctive from a wondrous place. I’d pick up the language which would have roughly the same grammar as modern English so it’d mostly be picking up vocab. Maybe even some of the same words.
I’d take up a career as a professional story teller telling stories of my homeland and it’s war of independence except calling the British forces, the Sith. I’d stick to stories of history they’d find believable. I’d use most of the money I made at first to buy human breastmilk from wet nurses. Human breast milk is full antibodies. Good stuff and being a modern I have no immunity to smallpox because my parents were never exposed to it and I was never vaccinated against it. I’d then seek out cows so I can get exposed to cow pox to vaccinate myself. The breast milk would help guard against whatever other nasties they have then too.
I’d save up my money and invent the tennis shoe, substituting leather for the rubber bottoms. Make some money with those and retire back to story making rich. Then I’d start teaching them about germ theory. I wouldn’t come out and call it germ theory, or teach them about microbes but I’d teach them that boiling things removes the curse (except for living things. don’t want any boiled alive horrors on my conscience thank you) being in contact with the cursed is what spreads it, and anything touched by the cursed can be cursed as well.
I don’t know if they’d believe me or not, but being the weird foriegner who seems to know junk, maybe. Plus I’d be able to drink water without getting sick because I’d know to boil it. Which might help convince them.
Then in my later years being a rich scifi nut with no worries anymore about maintaining credibility I’d tell them stories of other places such as a crew of brave sailors sailing the stars in the belly of a dragon named Moya on the run from the PeaceKeepers, of the Enterprise, a ship made of metal that can fly the stars due to magic enchantment by dilithium crystals.
I doubt my vast knowledge of TV trivia and proficiency with MS Office will do me much good in 1008. I think my best bet for survival is to try to cozy up to some nobleman and become his exotic mistress. It’s not that I want to become a sex worker, but I don’t really want to starve to death either. Sure, I’ll end up dying of syphilis or something, but I guess them’s the breaks.
