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- The wound never healed properly and became infected with ulcers that oozed pus and blood. The pain was unbearable and made Henry unable to walk or ride without assistance. The wound also emitted a foul smell that repulsed everyone around him.
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The wound also emitted a foul smell that repulsed everyone around him. The leg wound may have also contributed to other medical problems that Henry developed later in life, such as diabetes, gout, obesity and impotence.
- Even The Royals smelled.
- Waste Was Thrown on The Streets ...
- Or in The River.
- Butchers Killed Animals Where They Stood—In The Streets.
- Corpses Sometimes Got Left around.
- You Couldn't Even Escape at Home. Or The Theater. Or Anywhere.
Getty Images The problem reached all the way to the top: There’s a long history of foul-smelling royals. Queen Elizabeth I proudly declared that she took a bath “once a month, whether she needed to or not.” Her father, King Henry VIII, was even smellier. Later in life, the overweight monarch had a festering wound on his leg that you could smell fro...
Getty Images But the royal palaces were an olfactory paradise compared to what you could expect on history’s roads. Here’s how Catherine McNeur describes a typical 19th-century New York street in her book, Taming Manhattan: “Rotten food such as corn cobs, watermelon rinds, oyster shells, and fish heads joined with dead cats, dogs, rats, and pigs, a...
Getty Images More efficiently, night soil men would sometimes just throw the mess in the river. In the sweltering summer of 1858 in London, so much human excrement clogged the Thames that people started calling it “the Great Stink.” At Parliament, the curtains were doused with chloride of lime to cover up the stench. It didn’t work. Government offi...
Getty Images Then there was the smell of death. Butchers commonly killed and disemboweled animals in the streets. As King Edward III said in the 14th century, “By reason of killing great beasts, from whose putrefied blood running down the streets, and the bowels cast into the Thames, the air in the city is very much corrupted and infected.” He trie...
iStock Human corpses also contributed: One British church stashed an appalling 12,000 of them in its cellar, according to Catharine Arnold’s bookNecropolis. (The minister “sold” burials but didn’t actually bury anyone appropriately.) The fumes frequently made worshippers pass out.
Getty Images But perhaps the most insidious stink was that of everyday life. Homes stank; the whale-oil lamps exuded a nasty fishy odor. Churches stank; St. Thomas Aquinas approved of incense because the flock’s BO “can provoke disgust.” Theaters stank; at Shakespeare’s Globe, those who bought the cheap tickets were not-so-affectionately referred t...
Dec 1, 2009 · In 1527 Henry injured his left foot playing tennis, and the resultant swelling led him to adopt a single loose black velvet slipper, rapidly prompting a new fashion among his courtiers. 8 In the same year Henry was laid up at Canterbury with a ‘sorre legge’, the first record of a wound thought to be an ulcer, possibly on the thigh.
- CR Chalmers, EJ Chaloner
- 2009
Dec 4, 2009 · The head that wears the crown: Henry VIII and traumatic brain injury Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536): the red malar rash of familial SLE in...
- CR Chalmers, EJ Chaloner
- 2009
- B.O. ran rampant. At Shakespeare’s Globe, “Penny Stinkards” was the not-so-affectionate nickname of those who bought the cheap tickets. The pious also smelled: St. Thomas Aquinas approved of incense “in order that any disagreeable smell, arising from the number of persons gathered together in the building, that could cause annoyance, might be dispelled by its fragrance,” according to a translation by historian Jacob M. Baum.
- Bad breath was also pervasive. Speaking of French kings: Louis XIV was famous for his halitosis, which his mistress complained about to no avail. According to Texas A&M assistant professor Jane Cotter, oral hygiene at that time consisted mostly of toothpicks or a sponge soaked in brandy, but the Sun King’s oral issues ran much deeper: His palate had been punctured during the removal of some teeth, and “for the rest of his life,” Colin Jones writes at Cabinet magazine, “he could not eat soup without spraying his plate through his nose.”
- There was garbage everywhere. With garbage collectors a low priority, cities reeked. As Catherine McNeur writes in her book Taming Manhattan, “Rotten food such as corn cobs, watermelon rinds, oyster shells, and fish heads joined with dead cats, dogs, rats and pigs, as well as enormous piles of manure,” and they could all be found on a typical 19th century New York street.
- There was a plethora of poop. We mentioned the piles of manure in passing, but poop deserves its own section. Consider this: In 1835, New York had about 10,000 horses, which translated to 400,000 pounds of poop each day and was swept to the sides of the street like a post-blizzard snow, according to McNeur.
Dec 1, 2009 · Henry is shown wearing his famous garter around his left calf (although in other portraiture the garter is sometimes seen on the right leg).The importance of Thomas Vicary, himself instrumental...
Jan 1, 2024 · There is an enduring obsession with understanding the body and mind of Henry VIII, but how sound are diagnoses past and present – and do we need them? Sophie Shorland | Published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 1 January 2024. In his younger days Henry VIII was something of a heartthrob.
