Sawbones: Henry VIII

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine.

I'm your co-host, Justin McElroy.

And I'm Sidney McElroy.

So happy to be here with you, Sid, my

first and only wife.

Yes.

That's, I mean, I hope.

In West Virginia, at least.

No, I just have to.

I don't like this.

This is not intriguing.

I can't keep up with the family that I have.

The idea that I could maintain a second is absolutely infeasible.

No, I actually believe that.

I also think that you would probably accidentally call me the name of one of your other wives or something.

You wouldn't be able to, you'd get confused.

No,

you'd bring me like regular Dr.

Pepper instead of Diet Dr.

Pepper one day, and I'd go,

and then the drama would really escalate.

I mean, this is so.

I don't like this.

No, me neither.

I just want the one wife.

Thanks.

So

I was inspired not by

the prospect of you having multiple wives for this episode.

No, Harmony House is having its second annual Renaissance fair this year on May 3rd here in Huntington, West Virginia.

Yes.

If you're interested, you can check out our Facebook page.

Yes.

Harmony House.

We have a separate event page for the Renaissance.

Wow, you're really plugged in.

You can just look at it and you can come.

You can buy a ticket and you can come.

Anyway, I am a board member.

And so we've had all these conversations prepping for a Renaissance fair.

And they've been very strange conversations that I've had to

provide my input on things that I really have no expertise on.

So, for instance, like when it comes to like insurance for

sword swallowing or fire eating,

What's that all about?

Yeah, or probably rough, pretty pricey, I would think.

Or having to reach out to a city council member and saying, like, do we have an ordinance against sword fighting?

I think so.

We don't.

Good.

Now that's how we start settling stuff from y'all.

Do we have an ordinance against fortune telling within city limits?

We did.

We did.

Until last year.

Okay.

So,

bullet dodged on that one.

Wait, do we have an ordinance against bullet dodging?

Like in the Matrix.

Oh my gosh.

See, I don't even know.

I got to call again.

So these were all things that I've been trying to figure out, which you must do when you're helping to organize a renaissance fair.

I should say helping.

My mom's taking the lead.

I don't want to take credit.

However, one of our bigger questions was, how much room do you need for jousting, Justin?

At least two horses wide, right?

I would think at least two horses of space.

Maybe at least

a few horse breadths in between to the jousting going.

I think they run from far away.

They've got to run from at least probably 10 horse.

I would say 12 horse lengths.

That would be my guess.

And then we started talking about in the space we were holding this at the Riverfront Park, we were like, well, does it need to be on grass, right?

Shouldn't it?

It should be on grass.

It feels like it can't be.

Can we shut down Veterans Memorial Boulevard and hold a giant jousting tournament

on it?

I don't know.

And I thought, and I said, well, I feel like it should be on grass for maybe for the horses.

I don't know anything about horses.

But then also, if somebody falls off, isn't that what happens in jousting?

And I started thinking about jousting.

What happened back?

What were the medical implications of jousting?

Like, did you get stabbed or just sort of like rammed off of your horse?

Did you get trampled?

Yeah.

Did people die?

Yeah.

It seems like it would be a really rough day for whoever's in charge of healthcare.

Like, if there was a show about medieval doctors, I feel like jousting day would be a big episode, maybe a two-parter.

Yes, right?

Like, that would be, you'd have so many techniques and ways of dealing with jousting.

They must have had a doctor on site.

I don't know because I started to dig into jousting as a concept and I quickly arrived at all these articles about Henry VIII.

Okay.

Was he a big jouster?

Yes, a big jouster.

And more importantly, Henry VIII sustained a jousting injury that may or may not have changed the course of history.

Really?

This felt like sawbones to me.

This is our sort of thing.

It is possible that at one point in history, and I mean, that we know that this is true, somebody gets sick, suffers some sort of medical

thing that changes who they are, or maybe somebody dies from something and it changes human history in some way.

That person was so significant that it becomes

everything changes.

I mean, because of medicine.

I hope that that hasn't happened to me.

Like, I don't think that I have gotten like a case of diarrhea that changed the world, but I I may not know yet.

You know what I mean?

That's true.

That's kind of why history books will write.

I hope that if a medical thing happens to me that changes the course of human history, it's something cooler like jousting and not diarrhea.

Yeah, but I know myself, and honestly, I'll take what I can get.

Do you know, you've already alluded to multiple wives, so I'm guessing you know a little something about the wives.

Yeah, I know there's a musical about the six wives called six.

Yes, there's a musical about the six wives that I would very much like to see at some point, but I haven't.

But I do, I have read about the six wives, so I don't know the music.

I don't know the songs.

No, I know the wives.

And don't email us to say that we should because we know.

We should.

We should.

I also kind of knew, like, he changed the church so he could get divorced.

I knew that part.

He was married.

He made a whole new church, the church of England.

Yeah.

Not a new church.

A new,

not a church building.

No, I mean like a new family.

New the church of England.

Yes.

The concept.

Yeah.

the religion, the faith, the Church of England.

Flavor of faith is what we typically flavor.

Yeah, he invented a new flavor.

Genre.

So

I didn't, but I didn't know about this pivotal jousting accident and the fact that not only has it been theorized by historians, modern scientists and physicians and researchers have tried to look back and dig through historical record to figure out, because like we can't do an autopsy, but what, is it possible that that there was something significant that happened to him that made his behavior drastically different in later years of his life, which, of course, since he was king, influenced the decisions he made and the things that he did, the actions he took.

Sure.

So we have some historical precedents for this in Sawbones.

I think Phineas Gage

is the one that springs to mind, right?

That's a good corollary to what we're going to talk about.

Okay, cool.

So let's start with pre-1536.

This is the year of the, we will get into the historic jousting incident in 1536.

But prior to that, what was Henry VIII like?

So we have some documentation of him as a kid, not a ton, because he had an older brother.

And so Henry the VIII or no, that was his dad.

It was Henry VIII.

Okay, got it.

But Henry VIII had an older brother who

was presumed to be heir to the throne, right?

And so, I mean, I guess that's just the way it works when you write history.

You don't really need to write about the second son.

Yeah.

Because you figure the first one's the one who's going to do stuff.

I mean, 100%.

I think history always works that way, Sid.

And reality works that way, I think, you know?

Well, and I think like we kind of see, I don't know.

I feel like I always knew a lot more about Prince William.

Not now.

No.

Now I feel like we know a lot about both because, you know, Harry and Megan and the whole thing.

The whole thing.

There's some

nation's in Jacob.

I'm sure people in the UK have a lot more invested in that.

I just, as an American, I'm like, hmm, that seems dramatic.

Anyway,

we think he was a good kid.

There's some documentation that he was, there was a Spanish ambassador who wrote that there was no finer youth in the world than young Henry.

Yeah, that

he was a great guy.

He was described as lighthearted and merry in one

written account.

There was another that said he was prudent and wise and free from every vice.

So, just a great

all-around dude.

And his athleticism was praised.

He was great.

He loved sports.

He was an avid all-things sports at the time.

So, jousting, certainly, but also like

he would do archery.

You know, I'm realizing

it is so hard for me to picture like royals from this period in anything other than like what they wear for portraiture.

Like, you're talking about him being athletic, and all I can see is some dork in like the big poofy poofy sleeves and a dumb crown running around on a football field.

Like, the Burger King King.

Here's a description of his physical appearance.

Okay.

Okay.

If this will help.

Okay.

His Majesty is the most handsome potentate I have ever set eyes on.

Okay.

Above the usual height with an extremely fine calf to his leg and a round face so very beautiful it would become a pretty woman.

Just say a Justin McElroy type.

Like, that's the problem with history is they waste all these words.

Like, he's just exactly Justin McElroy.

He's just a McElroy type.

He's a Justin Justin McElroy type.

A very fine calf.

Very fine calf.

You're very proud of your calves, aren't you?

You saw that.

You saw a fine calf, and you're like, that's me.

That's me.

They're talking about me.

I did marching band.

He had some bouts of illness, which are typical for the times.

Like, he had smallpox.

Wow, dude.

What?

Pre-medicine?

No kidding.

It's literally pre-medicine.

Well, I mean, like the kinds of illnesses we expect for the time.

He had smallpox.

He had malaria a couple of times.

Even if the bouts were serious, we don't have any record that they were 1650 back then.

You were a real one, huh?

I mean, malaria a couple times.

A couple times.

He also, he suffered a lot of sporting injuries.

He was a wrestler.

Like I said, he did archery, tennis.

Of course, a jouster.

So he, you know, had some injuries related to that.

And he did have one, one issue that plagued him his whole life.

This was documented prior to the jousting incident.

He had chronic leg ulcers.

And I tried to read because there are a number of health conditions he develops later in life that you definitely could get chronic ulcers on your legs from them.

But he had them even when he was younger.

And it is suggested that it may have been because, and I don't know, I only found this in one account.

So

I'm not saying this is true, but it is possible that the leg ulcers originally stemmed from the very tight garters that he would wear

to show off his very fine calves.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Well, it's hubris, you know?

Is this a lesson for you, Justin?

Do you want to think about this?

I'll take the pain.

What?

Well, a little

circulation, whatever.

I don't need circulation.

The tight garters that you wear to show off your fine calves.

I don't need blood.

I've got these calves.

I've got all the appreciative looks.

I don't need blood in my calves.

Now, the argument that Henry VIII changed later in his life, and a lot of this is based on, I found this great article that a neuroscientist and some other researchers from Yale did in 2016, and they published this, where they began to outline a series that, because they were talking about his personality in the early years, and then what we're going to get to later.

So

they were discussing that there were a series of traumatic head injuries, and then we're going to culminate in the big one.

But there are a couple things that did happen prior to 1536 that may lead us in a certain direction.

So first is in March of 1524.

The king was jousting and he had a visor that he would wear when he was jousting, which I found one account that said the visor actually had his face on it like a picture of his face on the visor good luck which is kind of cool if you think about it but he had not pulled his visor all the way down and so he got struck in the head by the jousting lance

and i i don't see that he that it was like pierced or anything, but he fell off his horse.

He was kind of knocked out of it for a little bit.

I don't think he lost consciousness, but he was like confused, like concussiony kind of stuff.

and that he from that point on he had recurrent headaches so like migraines were something that he suffered because of jousting already if i'm that other dude if i'm that other dude i just keep on riding just keep on riding brother keep on riding you get to italy or something man well don't stop don't go back knock the king yeah i don't know like whatever they yeah i'm gonna put that in the faith that my monarch i'm gonna trust that my monarch is gonna be a good sport about me stabbing in the eye nope Peace.

I'm going to Florin or whatever.

I'm going to Gilder.

I'm going to the fictional nations mentioned in the Princess Bride.

That's how far I'm going.

That's how far away I'm going from this guy.

I'm going to Gilder.

So

there was another incident that he sustained while it says while hawking, which from what my understanding, hawking is in like H-A-W-K-I-N-G, hawking.

He was out.

It was some sort of hunting activity that, yeah, that you do with a hawk.

yeah hawking he was out hawking hawking i didn't know that you could use a hawk that way i don't know when you'd asked me to guess the the gerund i think i would have nailed it i'm in west virginia when somebody says they're hawking i think they're about to like

yeah yeah they're gonna or they're hawking two and i don't want to see that selling stuff they're gonna show when they're hawking they're gonna show me something in a dish and ask me what it means

about them So he attempted to,

he was pole vaulting over a hedge, I guess, as part of the hawking activities, and he fell, like the pole broke.

This visual:

what were kings out there even doing?

Like, you are the freaking king, and you were pole vaulting a hedge.

The pole breaks.

That's got to be so embarrassing.

And he falls, like, headfirst into a ditch.

Oh, my gosh.

I would quit being king.

And he has to be pulled out of the ditch, like, legs first.

So,

this is no, this was

the next year.

Okay.

This is 1525.

Yeah.

No, he 1524, he's hit in the head with a jousting lance, falls off his horse.

1525, he pole vaults over a hedge, pole breaks, he's dragged out of a ditch by his feet.

It's thought that he may have lost consciousness because he's dragged out by his legs, which makes you think, why wasn't he getting up?

So, you know, anyway, so like these are kind of the reason I'm mentioning these is there's sort of this like drumbeat of head injuries that are leading to January 24th, 1536.

Eastern Standard Time.

So he is at Greenwich Palace where he was born, where his daughter, Elizabeth I, was born.

He is 44 years old.

He's in good shape at the time.

He's jousting Sir Henry Norris, who was a close friend of Anne Boleyn, his second wife at this point.

And he's on his second wife.

We haven't really, we kind of skipped through the Catherine of Aragorn

stuff.

But anyway, he's on his second wife.

He is, he is jousting with Norris, and he tries to like thrust his lance towards Norris, I guess, as they're riding their horses towards each other, you know how jousting looks, right?

Like we've all seen it in movies or whatever.

Jousting.

Right.

So he's like running at it.

He's riding the horse at him.

And then he hits his saddle with his jousting lance instead of like Norris himself.

And so he hits the resistance.

You can kind of imagine.

And so it like rebounds him.

off of his horse instead.

And then by all accounts, he also got trampled by his horse.

Like his horse fell on top of him as he fell, fell on top of him.

Right.

And he was out for a a while.

And reports vary at this point.

There were some that were like, no, no, no, he got up pretty quickly.

And others were like, no, it was a few minutes.

And there's one account.

His majesty.

His majesty sprung up.

It was nothing for him.

It's like, I don't know.

He seemed like he was maybe lying there for like a second.

like a couple minutes.

Well, and there was one account, which I will say, the account, there's an account that says he was down for two hours or that he was unable to speak for for two hours, meaning that he was in some sort of altered state of consciousness for two hours following the event.

And that person who wrote that account, I will say, was in France at the time, so was not present.

This was all second or third hand.

But anyway, one way or another, this was a significant enough injury.

We know this.

Anne Boyleyn was so upset.

She didn't witness, there's no account that she actually witnessed his fall, but then with the state of him afterwards, that it was so traumatizing to her that they attribute her following pregnancy loss to this.

Wow, really?

That this incident was so shocking.

Now, we don't know for sure that that's obviously we cannot make that medical claim, but whatever happened to him seems to be pretty extreme and severe by most accounts, one way or another, right?

And then he wakes back up.

And this is where we think history changes forever.

And I'm going to tell you what we think happened to him.

Sydney.

But But first, we gotta go to the billing department.

Let's go.

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All right, Sid, history was about to change forever, I think you said?

Possibly.

Okay.

I mean, you know, we're all just guessing, right?

Right.

So the question is, at this point, there are these this paper from Yale, and there have been others who have suggested this.

This is not just one, one research paper.

I love, by the way, if you're somebody who writes historical research papers like this, if you take the time to say like, ah, I'm a neuroscientist and I understand the human brain and I'm going to use that knowledge to try to figure out if Henry VIII had a traumatic brain injury, thank you.

Thank you.

You make the world so much more interesting when you take that knowledge and apply it in that way.

I mean, there's all sorts of altruistic ways we can apply this knowledge, right, that make the world better today and in the future.

And hopefully we do that.

But if you also do this fun, fanciful little thing, you bring me much joy.

And I assume you too, listeners, because you're listening.

So anyway, did he suffer a traumatic brain injury or TBI?

I'm going to say TBI a lot because that's quicker.

Do you know what a TBI is?

Traumatic brain injury.

But what I'm insulting,

frankly.

What is happening?

Brain is injured in a way that is caused by damage to it.

What do you mean?

So

there's two sorts of ways that you get knocked in the head.

And TBIs can be suffered.

There are a number of ways, if you have encountered this concept, there are a number of places that we talk about it, I think, popularly today.

Certainly

in the military, we have people who have suffered TBIs from, usually from like concussive forces, explosions nearby, and that sorts of thing, or being in some sort of explosive, you know, that that is a source of TBIs, certainly the military.

Also in sports, right?

We talk about TBI a lot in terms of football, for instance.

Sure.

People who have had multiple

hits to the head.

Traumatic brain injuries.

Right.

Obviously, TBI can occur anytime you get knocked on the head pretty hard, right?

It doesn't have to be those scenarios.

A TBI, there are two kinds of injuries that can take place.

First is the actual force of the injury.

So was the brain knocked around in the skull, so to speak,

which is what happens with a concussion, but this is obviously more severe than a concussion.

With a concussion, we expect your symptoms to go away eventually.

This is not that.

The symptoms don't go away.

So you get compressive forces, you get tearing and pulling and shearing on the brain, you know, on the neuronal fibers,

the stuff that makes up the brain is actually getting injured.

But then there's also the secondary stuff that can happen, right?

Because after there's that physical sort of trauma to the brain brain tissue, there's swelling that can follow.

Stuff can bleed.

There can be pressure from that.

There can be areas of the brain that don't get oxygen for a while because a blood vessel has been torn or because of the compression of the blood or whatever, right?

Or the swelling.

So there's a couple different ways that damage is happening.

And so the way that that manifests, the way that we then look at somebody clinically and say, hmm, you have the signs and symptoms of a TBI, will look different from person to person.

There are certain things that we see see pretty commonly.

Amnesia is one of them.

You can have trouble.

You can have memory issues following a traumatic brain injury.

Okay.

Okay.

We can see changes in sort of your like frontal lobe stuff.

And when we say frontal lobe stuff, this is when we're getting into the Phineas Gage territory, like the you.

Your personality stuff.

Your personality, the you of you.

You can see people become more apathetic or not care about things as much or not seem as emotional or passionate or engaged about things as they used to be.

And again, different from person to person.

This also gets into like impulse control and emotional regulation.

So people who,

you know, previously were pretty level-headed, pretty calm, all of a sudden are impulsive, prone to bouts of anger, do things that they wouldn't do before, like hurting others or engaging in high-risk behaviors that they wouldn't have done previously, or things like impulse control, like eating a lot, like very direct, like, I'm going to keep eating this bag of chips until I get sick.

I can't stop myself.

Impulse control, too.

I think we think impulse control and we always think like intentional, like

I'm mad at you, so I'm going to punch you.

And then I do it because I have no impulse control.

But it's also that, like,

you almost think like

that automatic kind of reaction.

Just taste good, eat it, taste good, eat it, taste good, eat it.

You know?

So, like, all, all kinds of impulse control.

Some executive dysfunction, so like planning,

the idea that you could take a problem and break it down and find different solutions, or like diplomatic relations, perhaps.

I'm getting into that.

For example, right, all the areas like how can we resolve this without going to war?

Maybe.

All of that sort of stuff can be damaged.

And then you can also have symptoms like headaches and insomnia.

And this can also lead into, because you've got your pituitary.

organ up there, which is in charge of a lot of endocrine stuff.

So hormones and things like that.

That can be changed as well.

So when you have a traumatic brain injury, we can see problems with like growth hormone deficiency in some cases or like hypogonadism.

And the reason I say that specifically is that there are a lot of, there's documentation later on in Henry VIII's life of some issues with like performance, with impotence.

And, and this is different from descriptions of a pretty amorous guy previously, right?

Like, we know he had six wives.

He also had quite a few affairs in there.

That's, again, disputed historically.

We know of some of the affairs.

There are others we think he had.

Okay.

I mean, like, you know, before he was with Anne Boylan, he was with her sister, Mary.

Yeah.

That's, that's also a theme.

Yeah.

Do you know his first wife, Catherine of Aragorn, was initially married to his older brother?

But then his older brother died.

I think.

Didn't you tell me that earlier?

No.

Oh, sorry.

I did tell you his older brother died, but I didn't tell you that he then went on to marry.

That is why the connection was there, yeah.

Yeah.

Which was all like an arranged political, diplomatic like the pope was in on it and all the kings and you know you know you know how these things go i mean he was betrothed when he was 10.

so i mean

anyway so all this is what a tbi can look like and there are a lot of things that happened after this jousting incident in henry viih's life that kind of lead to i think if you did you have any inclination as to how you would describe henry the eighth's character?

I mean, you knew about his six wives.

Did you have any thought of who was this guy other than that he got married a lot?

I feel like too much content

on the podcast that I do lately has been generated by how little I know about the things that other people know.

And it's not my favorite thing in the world, but I will say this:

nothing.

I mean, nothing.

I think that he was maybe a bigger fella and a rotund guy, which I respect.

We stand.

He was, I think he had a beard and the gilded hat.

And I think maybe in one of the pictures, I'm seeing a turkey leg.

I don't know if that's like a personality thing or if it's just like one time he had that.

It kind of is later on in his life.

That's not, these are not, nothing you're saying is wrong.

I think I kind of assumed, and maybe this is as a woman coming at this, I kind of assumed he was a jerk.

Like my perception of him is that he was not a nice guy.

Yeah.

I mean, he had two of his wives executed.

Doesn't seem nice.

Seems mean.

Seems like a mean thing to do.

He was willing to create a new religion to divorce a woman.

But from another perspective, he was willing to create a new religion to marry another woman.

And, you know, if the romantic books have taught us anything,

you know, people love it when you're willing to make big sacrifices, like tear off an opposing God's head or whatever to prove your love.

So in that sense, it's pretty metal that he made a whole new religion just because he loved the second one so much.

That is, again, I think debatable historically because,

okay,

I didn't know all this prior to recently.

I'm not wrapping up a bunch of articles about him.

I'm just floating it history.

I'm just floating it.

What I'm saying is that his first wife, he didn't want to marry her in the first place.

He eventually did agree to marry her, and then she was not able to produce him a male heir.

And he was very upset about this.

Now, that I can relate, buddy.

He'd actually had, uh-huh, I'm ignoring that.

He'd actually had a male child with an affair, and he was considering trying to have him recognized officially so that he would have a male heir.

Yeah.

And then he started having an affair with Mary Boyleyn, and then he met her younger sister Ann and was like, oh, now I like this one.

And so he was trying to figure out how he could marry Ann in pursuit of of a male heir.

So a lot of this is tied up with gross men's stuff.

Just saying.

I know.

I don't know if there was love.

So, anyway, after this jousting injury and he came to,

he seemed different.

And I don't mean immediately.

I don't mean that somebody wrote like, after he woke up, he was a total jerk.

But when we start to look into some of the descriptions of him and the actions he took afterwards,

he's a little more tyranty.

He's a little more despotic.

Okay.

So.

And maybe it was the thing contributing to that, right?

There's, there's some, yes.

And there's some specific bouts of like forgetfulness.

Like one of his wives, he would order his guards to come get and take to the Tower of London.

And then when they showed up to get her, he was like, what are you doing here?

Get out.

Because he forgot.

So like, there's some well-documented

kind of amnesia episodes afterwards.

He also seemed to become really irrational and impulsive.

He definitely had people executed before,

but he seemed to have a lot more people executed for a lot more specious reasons after.

People would suddenly become enemies of the crown

overnight, who he previously had confided in or were trusted advisors or were family members.

He would suddenly decide were actually against him.

Kind of became paranoid about that.

Okay.

And he became pretty different.

These intense bouts of rage, he just changed.

I will say at this time, in addition to the traumatic brain injury,

one of the ulcers on his leg that he had suffered for a while, which had been healing, had opened back up, probably as a result of the horse falling on him, I would guess.

And

it is well documented that this injury also contributed to a change in his personality because his leg was so damaged that his doctors told him, you really shouldn't do any of these sports things anymore.

You should probably spend most of your time seated or laying down.

He became a lot more sedentary afterwards and stopped engaging in things that he had previously, as far as we know, really enjoyed.

And there were a lot of like bouts of melancholy

and depression by modern standards that followed that.

So there's more to it.

There's some other conflating factors.

There's some other stuff.

So, and of course, he would go on only four months after this incident.

He would accuse Anne Boylin, his wife at the time, of adultery, incest, witchcraft, and conspiring to kill him.

And then also, he was mad because she didn't provide him with a male heir either.

And he had her executed

only four months after this.

It's weird.

So definitely a shift.

He would, just to kind of, since we've all heard of the six wives, he went on to marry Jane Seymour, who did produce an Edison woman, of course.

Different Jane Seymour

did produce him a male heir who would go on to become king, Edward, but she died after that.

No, he didn't kill her.

She just died.

He then married Anne of Cleves because he saw a portrait of her that was really pretty.

He agreed to marry her, but then when she showed up, he was like, this is not the like the internet lied, kind of.

Yeah.

Like, I regret, I regret swiping on this one.

Okay.

But it was too late.

He had to marry her.

And so they never consummated their marriage and they had it annulled right afterwards.

And he basically said, it's not my fault.

The portrait tricked me.

She wasn't very pretty.

Okay.

Which again seems pretty.

Pretty messed up.

Right.

Okay.

He then married the very young Catherine Howard, who took a bunch of lovers.

So he had her beheaded.

Are you trying to like justify why he did all that?

Like, like, is this like a reality of Henry?

No, what I'm saying is his behavior got really weird.

Got really weird.

His final wife outlived him, Catherine Parr.

Other than the treatment of his wives, he also frequently would have people executed and, you know, engage in warfare throughout his later years.

And again, a lot of the descriptions of how he would behave with his court were dramatically different, especially like the last 10 years of his life than they were in previous years when he was described as a guy people really liked, as like a really transformational, important, cool king.

that changed England forever and led to the Reformation, obviously, the church and all that.

There's also the health problems and the compulsive eating that is noted.

At one point, when you talk about the turkey leg, this is probably where you're getting this.

He may have eaten up to 13 dishes a day, the majority comprising meat such as lamb, chicken, beef, game, rabbit, a variety of birds like peacock and swan, and he drank 10 pints of ale a day as well as wine.

Hunchy, punchy.

He continued to have problems with gout with that diet.

You can understand why.

A lot of rich foods.

He had all these boils on his legs and ulcers.

It was extremely painful.

So he's also in chronic pain, I should note.

And he,

you know, again, was kind of sedentary in those later years.

As you said,

his suit of armor is displayed because they had to have it specially made because he did gain quite a bit of weight.

And so they had to like specially make a suit of armor for him to continue to wear when he would go out, I guess, in full armor dress.

in later years.

And he had mood swings and all of that.

Now, not everyone thinks this.

A lot of people have written about Henry VIII's change from when he was young to when he was old in personality, in the kind of guy he was and what influence that may have had on the course of human history.

Some people say he had syphilis.

This has never been proven.

Some people say this was probably due to diabetes, which he may well have had.

And maybe he had some, you know, like many strokes and some vascular damage as a result of that.

Some people think he had hypothyroidism that never got diagnosed.

Other people thinks he had psychosis, that this was a behavioral health problem that nobody ever, you know, nobody knew or knew how to treat at the time.

And then other people say, you know what?

I don't think he ever changed because to be fair, he created a whole church to divorce his wife before the jousting thing.

And also his first act as king was to have two of his dad's advisors executed.

So like he kind of liked executing people

even before.

That's fair.

But I think it's interesting that on that day in January of 1536, a guy fell off a horse and maybe changed all of human history.

And maybe it's a good lesson to us all that we shouldn't have one guy in charge or one girl or one person.

Definitely not one guy.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Well, we can all agree on that.

But I mean, I think it's a good, it's a good reminder why power should be shared.

Because if we just put one, one human in charge, there's a chance that that human will get in a jousting accident and fall off a horse and the horse will fall on him.

And that when he wakes up, he'll be different forever.

And we've put him in charge.

Thank you so much for listening to our podcast we hope you've enjoyed yourself and maybe learned a little something thanks to the taxpayers for the use of their soul medicines as the intro and outro of our program if you want to stop on by the mckelroy family merch store you can go to mckelroymerch.com the reason i mentioned it is because 10 of proceeds this month will go to support harmony house which is a cause that's very near and dear to our hearts so if you want to go over there and buy some stuff we really appreciate it uh that's going to do it for us until next time my name is justin mclroy i'm sydney mclroy As always, don't drill a hole in your head.

All right.

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