Why the Bronte sisters may have died so young (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Bronte sisters may have died so young (2019)

yorkshirepost.co.uk

56 pointslermontov50 comments

Many years ago, I lived in a trailer for a few months. My health went to hell and the experience was nightmarish.

While living there, I swore to myself I would never live in a trailer again and stated "I would rather live in a tent." Which I did, in actual fact, do for some years at a later date.

I got healthier while sleeping in a tent and desperately poor.

Doctors used to take their little black bag and do house calls. This allowed them to know a lot of things about your life without asking and to factor that into their diagnosis and treatment.

I think medicine is worse off for no longer doing that and I think Sick Building Syndrome is much more prevalent than people realize.

I haven’t thought about the context gained by a house call before, but that’s a very good point. Thanks for sharing.

Doctors still do house calls, but if you’re poor then you’re lucky to be seeing a doctor at all. Neither of these things have changed.

Unless you live in a country with universal healthcare.

There is no relation between universal healthcare and house visits. I live in a country with universal healthcare where house calls don't exist.

I believe the parent commenter was noting that with universal healthcare the relation to poverty and not being to see the doctor was not longer a problem.

That is not completely true either, most countries have a form of free basic care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

Here in the UK I didn’t think house calls exist, but then my wife got a severe chest infection while she was pregnant on a weekend. I called the NHS help line, and there was a doctor with us in 4 hours.

There’s always a price.

When I was kid in Germany the doctor would do housecalls when I had fever. These days I can imagine this done only for very old people, either in Germany or the US.

They did in Sweden as wheel until the early 90s

* as well

Never going to get used to double checking what I type on the phone =(

In Denmark they did a housecall for my daughter when she was about 1 year old and it was possible she had pneumonia and it was a weekend.

on edit: I remember when I was living in Germany about the age of 7 I had a fever of 40 and the doctor did a housecall.

My Dad was a doctor, so technically we got a house call everyday. But the reality was that we never saw a doctor at all. If we needed a physical for school sports my dad would just look at us and say "Eh, you look healthy" and sign it. I was in my early 30s before I got a real checkup from a doctor for the first time since I was born.

Did your dad also administer immunizations himself?

Actually, yes. Also, whenever one of us needed a medication he would just write the prescription for what we needed. The only exceptions were if one of us broke a limb. Then he'd take us to a friend doctor who specialized in that sort of thing to fix us up.

Modern medicine in general is very good at treating symptoms but unfortunately focuses way too much on symptoms and not enough on living conditions, be it buildings, nutrition or other factors. A lot of buildings in the US have terrible air quality and bad drinking water quality. Add to that the unhealthy lifestyles people are living it's no wonder they get sick.

Unfortunately it seems kind of taboo to point this out to people. I know people who are 100 pound or more overweight and are getting back surgeries and knee and ankle replacements. The rational thing to do would be to tell them to lose weight first to reduce the strain on the joints. Or if somebody needs antidepressants maybe it would be a good idea to reduce workplace stress.

Reminds me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQ0RFTHvIo

> Dr Suzannah Lipscomb show us the dangerous ways the Victorians adulterated food and its deadly consequences.

Apparently they added something to milk which made it smell ok even whem spoiled. But causing tuberculosis and killing huge amounts of ppls.

Excellent video, thanks for sharing.

Additives put tuberculosis in milk? Are you sure it wasn't the cows that had TB?

I assumed they meant that the additives made it difficult to detect that the milk had gone off and so it was easier to get sick from it.

To you point however, I don't understand how that could have increased the transmission of TB as that is caused by cows infected with Bovine TB and (AFAIK) that can't simply be detected by taste or smell.

Watching the video, it seems they assumed TB grew in milk, but according to growth requirements[1], it seems unlikely, and an unwarranted conclusion.

Still, it seems boric acid could have caused irritation, directly helping TB infect people. Also it reduced acidification, which would change bacterial population (for better or worse), and increasing bacterial loads of "spoiled" milk could weaken human defences, or not ..

I wouldn't blame Bovine TB on boric acid added to milk without further study.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_bovis#Growth_req...

They used to water it down to - but weren't to particular about where the water came from - the local creek etc.

I'm a scifi guy but have read Jane Eyre three times. I don't think I can define the appeal. Or why I connect Jane with Beth Harmon and perhaps Lisbeth Salandar.

I was just trying to explain why Jane Eyre was good to someone, and it's really hard to put into words.

Huh, I quit it at 35 of 38 chapters. I kept reading thinking “surely this will get good at some point” but then I realized that for me, it wouldn’t.

Have you read The Eyre Affair? A quirky, humorous, combination of Jane Eyre with a scifi world obsessed with literature. Lots of fun.

Also a lover of sci-fi/fantasy

I watched the 2011 film and wondered if I might enjoy reading the book now I know what will happen. But you've convinced me to give it a go.

I know it's not quite the same but I'm Reading through the Anne of Green Gables series and thoroughly enjoying it.

>In the 19th century, however, women were unable to eat or drink and could die from malnutrition and dehydration.

What?

It’s saying (poorly) that women afflicted by hyperemesis gravidarum couldn’t keep fluids down- today, IV fluids bypass this problem, and are extremely effective.

The sad thing is there are also very successful oral fluid replacement regimes, but they are hard & not intuitive.

Ah I see, thank you for that.

What are those techniques? I'm quite intrigued by 'not intuitive'.

Water + salts + glucose given orally in the correct ratio; you need water, sugar, sodium, and potassium for it to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy

With vomiting, you can administer a spoonful of sugar water or salt water every 2-3 minutes, no more. You must do this for at least an hour.

It works because the fluid is absorbed through your mouth, throat, and esophagus before it reaches the stomach- and in many cases once you are rehydrated the vomiting improves.

Good tool at 2AM for parents of small children.

The article seems to be based on an 1850 report initiated by Patrick Brontë. It's available online:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sanitary-report-on-hawort...

People are still living, and dying, like this. Usually not the middle classes though.

Where, how?

In the USA

citation?

You must be kidding! Literately three seconds on duckduck and...

https://nhchc.org/clinical-practice/homeless-services/ethica...

I cannot be bothered going deeper. This is not my field. But millions of Americans are having their lives cut short for all sorts of easily, if not cheaply, remedied causes

Branwell Bronte, their brother also died young.

So why? Article doesn't answer the question.

Maybe it's more prosaic than what you expected (I did), but it's there:

> Haworth's drinking water, they believe, came from springs which were contaminated by rainwater that had soaked through the church graveyard - which was close to the parsonage where the Brontes lived. Long-term exposure to the bacterial infections this caused could have weakened the constitutions of the siblings and those of their neighbours, whose average lifespan was only around 26.

Good Lord.

Also, tuberculosis.

Because their water source was contaminated by rainwater that ran through a graveyard. I don't know if that's a plausible claim, but that's the claim.

Seems possible. https://iwaponline.com/jwh/article/13/2/285/28303/Impact-of-...

Yes it does! It’s because their water was polluted by the close proximity of the graveyard.

Very nice piece of information!

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