“Rising of the lights” has intrigued me since I first saw it referenced in Jonathan Miller’s “The Body in Question” years ago.
…which has now led me down this particular rabbit hole - letters to the BMJ in 1926 postulating what it might have been. Coughing seems to be the uniting factor.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2523749/?page=1
Onebox is oneborked.
Was this from Castle Aaauuuugggh?
And I died from “Teeth.” Does not specify if mine or some others. I choose to believe I went down battling werewolves!
Give me gruel or give me death!
Oh…
I discovered when I was trying to learn broad pen calligraphy that the long ‘s’ makes perfect sense. Fitting a regular ‘s’ into a line is very messy.
Yeah, it seems like it was a variety of conditions which caused breathing problems, from croup to asthma (and even, according to some, “hysteria”), though apparently the most common cause (at least at certain points in history) was some sort of postpartum infection, as most of the listed dead had just given birth. It seems like what conditions fell under the label changed over time.
Yeah, apparently a number of the more common causes of death listed here were most frequently childbirth-related.
Given how bad maternal mortality rates are in parts of the US (not to mention, more generally, deaths by preventable causes), we’re already pretty barbaric by contemporary standards.
Seems like good guesses - probably all of those things, as no doubt it was a variety of diseases lumped together by common, superficial symptoms at best. (And also superficial symptoms seen on corpses, no less.)
Though I saw something that seemed to connect it to “rising of the lights” as another childbirth-connected cause of death. But it seems like these labels referred to a variety of conditions that weren’t necessarily related in any way that would make sense to us. So one label might cover some diseases of the lung, liver, heart and brain…
“Stomach” seems a pretty unambiguous indicator of at least the general location of the malaise(s) it describes, but I notice that the names of conditions also didn’t always seem to be connected to the body part they appear to reference. “Stopping of the stomach? Oh yes, that’s a leg ailment…”
A bunch of these would make great metal band names.
I decided to reincarnate myself and try again
Does that mean I farted myself to death, or was it a He-Gassen situation?
Found dead in the street at St. Peters in Cheapside.
I’ll take “Possible fates of Piers Morgan” for $500.
I’m sorry, “Possible fates of Piers Morgan” was “Kild ‘accidentally’ with a carbine, at St. Michael Wood St.”
I may be getting mixed signals with Katie Hopkins.
Tooth Fairy, but the newspapers of the day were anti-fairy.
That gif is really, really, REALLY creepy 
“Griping in the Guts” did me in. What a way to go.
I’m just up the road. I’ll lay some flowers in your memory.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
