Episode 151: Sick to Death

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 151, Sick to Death.

In this episode, we're going to continue our look at the reign of Henry VIII.

We're also going to revisit a topic that I touched on back in the Anglo-Saxon period, the issue of sickness and disease.

Several important developments in the treatment of disease took place during Henry's reign, as the practice of medicine started to move out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era.

Those developments are especially important as it relates to Henry because he was plagued with injury and illness during the latter part of his reign.

Henry was often sick and tired, and he was also sick and tired of his new wife, Anne Boleyn.

His marital problems were remedied by Anne's execution, followed immediately by yet another marriage.

But there were no simple solutions to his physical problems, which continued to plague him throughout this tumultuous period.

So, this time we'll look at those developments, and we'll see how the events of this period shaped the English language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/slash of English.

Now I concluded the last episode with the deaths of Thomas Moore and William Tyndale.

As we saw over the past couple of episodes, Moore and Tyndale were engaged in a heated debate with each other over the use of English in the church.

Moore opposed it, while Tyndale risked his life to translate the Bible into English.

Eventually, they both ran afoul of the king and they were both executed in the mid-1530s.

Well, the debate over over the proper role of English wasn't limited to the church.

It also extended into other areas, like medicine.

In fact, there were some remarkable parallels between religion and medicine when it came to the use of English.

Physicians were trained in Latin, just like priests, and they felt that they were the only ones who had the expertise to consult those textbooks and interpret the contents for the common people.

Physicians opposed the translation of those medical books into English, just like most priests opposed a translation of the Bible into English.

They both felt that English translations would be misused by the common people who wouldn't fully understand what they were reading.

And in both cases, the printing press changed everything by overruling those objections and providing the people with English translations anyway.

As we've seen, people really wanted books that they could read for themselves in English.

They wanted to read the Bible in English for their spiritual health, and they wanted to read medical books in English for their physical health.

This was an era when plague and disease were constant threats.

Even minor illnesses could cause severe pain and death, so it isn't surprising that books related to medical treatments were some of the most popular books in the early era of printing.

It's estimated that about a thousand different books related to medical treatments and cures were published in Europe in the first half century of printing.

When William Caxton brought the printing press to England in the late 1400s, one of his early publications was a book called The Governall of Health.

Governall meant guide, and more specifically meant a regimen to promote good health.

As other presses were established in England, more and more medical books were printed.

Many of those books contained traditional treatments like herbal remedies, special drinks and foods, salves, charms, and so on.

But they were almost all based on the underlying concept of the four humors, the idea that the body was made up of four fluids or humors, yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.

It was thought that sickness occurred when those four humors were out of balance, and most remedies were designed to bring those humors back into balance.

We explored this idea way back in episode 63 because it was the view of medicine that dominated the Middle Ages.

In fact, it goes all the way back to ancient Greek physicians like Hippocrates and Galen, who lived during the time of the Roman Empire.

Their writings formed the basis of medieval medicine in Europe, and translations of their works were very popular in the early era of printing.

Over 600 editions of Galen's writings were published during the 1500s, and those very old ideas were still widely accepted in the 1500s.

Part of the reason why medical books were so popular in the age of print is because most people treated their ailments at home, so they wanted a book that they could consult if they or their family members were sick.

Of course, people sometimes sought more professional help for serious conditions, but getting that help was far from guaranteed.

With little or no regulation of the practice of medicine, anyone could claim to be a healer.

That meant that there were far more quacks and frauds than actual trained physicians.

And that was part of the reason why physicians were concerned about people having access to medical books in English.

They felt that it would only make matters worse.

In the 1540s, an author named Thomas Fayer translated a medical book from French into English.

He called it the Regiment of Life.

In the preface, he took aim at physicians who criticized English translations of medical books.

Here's the passage in contemporary modern English.

How long would they have the people ignorant?

Why do they begrudge the translation of medicine into English?

Would they have no person know such things other than themselves?

What does that make them, merchants of our lives and deaths, that we should buy our health only from them at their prices?

No good physician is of that mind.

Now here's the same passage in the original English of the sixteenth century.

How long wilt they have the people ignorant?

Why garage they physic to come forth in English?

Would they have no man to conno but only they?

Or what make they themselves, merchants of our lives and deaths, that we should pay our health only them, and at their prices?

No good physician is of that mind.

Again, these arguments are very reminiscent of the arguments made by supporters of the English Bible.

They were both arguing that it was good for people to have access to the material in their own language.

Now you may have noticed that the passage I read a moment ago used the word physician and not doctor.

Well, that was because physician was the more common term in Tudor England.

Doctor usually referred to a scholar or someone with an advanced degree from a university, the same way we might refer to someone with a PhD as doctor today.

That's ultimately how the word doctor came to be applied to someone with an advanced medical degree, but that didn't really become common until the 1600s.

You might remember from an earlier episode that the Old English word for a doctor was a latcha, which became leech in Middle English, L-E-E-C-H.

But that word had largely disappeared by the 1500s.

Again, it was replaced by the word physician.

You may have also noticed in that passage that the practice of medicine was referred to as physic.

So rather than doctors engaging in the practice of medicine, the people of Tudor England would have referred to physicians engaged in the practice of physic.

Now Henry VIII believed in the importance of trained physicians, and early in his reign he established the Royal College of Physicians, which was an attempt to bring some order to the practice of medicine.

The College of Physicians was comprised of trained physicians, and it was given the authority to license and regulate the profession.

Licenses were issued to qualified physicians who had received a medical degree from a university.

It was an early attempt to make it clear who was qualified to give medical advice and who wasn't.

But the creation of the College of Physicians was merely the first step in the long process that gradually brought order to the practice of medicine.

The organization did issue licenses to physicians, but there simply weren't enough physicians to satisfy the overall demand for medical care.

Furthermore, many common people couldn't afford the fees charged by those physicians anyway.

So most people continued to rely upon other healers.

Those healers included surgeons, who were distinct from physicians during this period.

Surgeons performed a variety of surgical procedures, from lancing boils to amputations, but they were not held in the same high regard as physicians.

They were considered manual laborers, and their expertise came from serving as apprentices in trade guilds.

They were supposed to perform the surgeries that the physicians recommended, but very often they acted on their own and provided their own medical services.

There were also barbers, and that may seem like an odd group to include here, but you might remember from earlier episodes that barbers not only cut hair, they also performed minor surgeries, like bloodletting and removing teeth.

After all, they had access to sharp razors and knives.

So they also provided medical treatments, and since they had their own guild, they didn't have to be licensed by the physicians either.

There were also the apothecaries, who made herbal remedies and other medicines.

Again, they usually provided the medicines that the physicians prescribed, but very often they gave out their own medical advice and recommended their own treatments.

They were affiliated with the Grocer's Guild, so they were not formally licensed either.

These various groups often argued with each other and competed for influence, but they made up a large share of the medical market place in Tudor, England, so much so that they limited the influence of the licensed physicians.

But one place where physicians did have a great deal of influence was in the royal court, especially in Henry's court.

Throughout his reign Henry suffered from a variety of illnesses, and his doctors were some of the few people who kept his trust and loyalty throughout his reign.

Henry had several doctors, but one of his most prominent physicians was William Butts.

Henry trusted Dr.

Butt's advice, and Butts remained by Henry's side until they both died within a couple of years of each other.

In fact, a book was published in the year 1540 which contained many of the cures and treatments that were used by Henry's doctors.

It even included a large number of treatments that were specifically attributed to Henry himself.

It's sometimes called Dr.

Butts' Diary, or the Prescription Book of Henry.

The treatments and remedies contained in the book provide a great deal of insight into the illnesses that Henry experienced during his reign.

Now, Dr.

Butts actually got his start by serving as the physician to Henry's daughter, Mary.

In 1525, Mary had been sent to Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches.

She had her own court there, with Dr.

Butts as her personal doctor.

Even though Wales was a territory of England, it was still a dangerous place for Englishmen, and that included Mary's English court.

After a couple of years, they all returned to London, and that's when Dr.

Butts became one of Henry's personal physicians.

Over the next few years, Butts not only treated Henry, he also treated Henry's close advisors and Henry's wife, Anne Boleyn.

He quickly became one of Henry's favorite physicians.

Now I mentioned that Dr.

Butts got his start in Wales with Princess Mary.

Well around the current point in our overall story in 1535, there was a very important development in the relationship between England and Wales, and it was a development that impacted the history of English.

In that year, Parliament enacted a law which began the process of unifying the two regions, under English rule, of course.

Henry wanted to bring Wales in line with England by requiring Wales to use English law, and by organizing the local governments along English lines.

The Welsh were also given representation in Parliament.

The reason why this union is so important to our story is because the Act adopted in 1535 also designated English as the official language of Wales.

English had to be used for all governmental purposes, and all government officials in Wales had to speak English.

Up until this point, most of the common people in Wales spoke Welsh, the native Celtic language.

But now that started to change.

I should mention that the provisions that imposed the English language in Wales were actually repealed later, and by later, I mean in 1993, in the Welsh Language Act of 1993.

That 1993 Act was part of a larger effort to preserve and protect the Welsh language, but the laws requiring the use of English had been maintained in Wales for nearly five centuries, and that meant that English became firmly entrenched in the region over the course of that time.

Now, Princess Mary returned to London after her time in Wales, but she had a very rocky relationship with her father, Henry VIII.

Mary was close to her mother, Catherine of Aragon, who had been kicked to the curb when Henry married Anne Boleyn.

The annulment of that first marriage also raised the issue of Mary's legitimacy, since the annulment meant that her parents' marriage never actually existed.

Nevertheless, Mary was the eldest of Henry's two daughters, and as such, the selection of her future husband became a matter of strategic importance.

Over the years, many different options were explored.

At one point, she was formally engaged to the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, whose realm included Spain and the Spanish New World, but that engagement was later rescinded.

Henry also entertained the idea of having her marry the son of the French king, or perhaps even the French king himself.

Those negotiations reflect the delicate balance of power in Europe at the time.

The two dominant powers were France and the Habsburg Empire, and Henry found himself flirting with each of them them in order to check the power of the other.

Meanwhile, the French king, Francis I, had come to realize that the Habsburg Empire had a major advantage thanks to its territories in the New World, so he began to look to the New World as well.

In the 1520s, he had funded an expedition by an Italian navigator named Giovanni de Verrazzano to determine if there was a passage through the northern part of the New World that would allow French ships to reach Asia without having to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America.

This was part of the search for the elusive Northwest Passage.

By the time of this particular expedition in the 1520s, the Spanish had explored the North American coast from Florida up to the modern Carolinas, and the English had discovered Newfoundland in the far north.

But it still wasn't clear what lay in between, in what is today the northeastern coast of the United States.

So Verrazzano was sent to explore the region to see if a northwest passage could be found.

Verrazzano sailed to the coastal region of the Carolinas and then headed north.

He traveled through the Chesapeake Bay and eventually reached the western tip of Long Island.

Of course that's where New York City is located to day.

Verrazano then continued up the coast past Cape Cod to Newfoundland.

Along the way he became the first known European to explore the northeastern coast of the New World.

And you may know that there's a major bridge in New York City today called the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

It connects Staten Island and Brooklyn, and it's named after this early explorer, Giovanni de Verrazzano.

About a decade passed after Verrazano's expedition.

Then around the current point in our story in the mid-1530s, the French king authorized another expedition, this time by a French explorer named Jacques Cartier.

He explored part of the same region, specifically the region along the St.

Lawrence River in eastern Canada.

Again, Cartier initially thought the river might be the elusive northwest passage, but it wasn't.

But Cartier's expedition is important because it led to France laying claim to the region.

Cartier encountered indigenous people along the river who called their settlements Canada in their native Iroquoian language.

And that word Canada is the ultimate source of the modern name of the region, Canada.

Now, during this same period, the Spanish were continuing their expansion across South America with the conquest of the Inca civilization in Peru.

The Spanish had already conquered the Aztec civilization in Mexico in the prior decade, and both conquests were accomplished in part because of something the Spanish brought with them, smallpox.

The disease reached Mexico in 1520, and it's estimated that it eventually killed nearly half of the Aztec people there.

The same thing then happened to the Inca in South America in the 1530s.

The indigenous people of the Americas had never encountered smallpox before, so they had little or no immunity to the disease.

They also had no immunity to other European diseases, like measles and bubonic plague.

So they were highly susceptible to those diseases.

But sometimes that process worked in reverse.

As I noted in an earlier episode, it appears that Europeans acquired syphilis in the New World and then took it back to Europe.

So smallpox and syphilis were exchanged between the two regions in the early 1500s.

And though the diseases are different, they do have at least one thing in common, pockmarks.

Both diseases caused pock marks on the infected person's skin, and for that reason, both diseases were referred to as poxes.

And interestingly, both diseases arrived in England for the first time in the early 1500s.

As I noted, syphilis was new to Europe, but smallpox had existed in parts of Europe for centuries.

However, there's no evidence that smallpox had ever made it across the channel to England.

But in the early 1500s, both diseases were recorded in England for the first time.

And again, both were called poxes since they produced pockmarks and pustules.

The blisters and pustules produced by smallpox were a little smaller than those produced by syphilis.

So people in England started to refer to those marks as the smallpox.

and that's how the disease acquired its name in England.

Meanwhile, the pock marks produced by syphilis were a little larger, so that disease was initially called simply the pox, or the great pox.

At the time, many people thought that syphilis originated with French troops in Italy, so it was sometimes referred to as the French pox, or the French disease.

The term syphilis was coined in Italy in the 1530s and was eventually adopted within English in the late 1600s.

By the way, smallpox and syphilis weren't the only diseases that caused pock marks.

Another common disease that produced similar marks was known as swine pox in the early 1500s, but we know that condition today as chicken pox.

So there were a lot of poxes around in the early 1500s.

As I noted, smallpox was new to England, and interestingly, one of the first known victims of the disease in England was Henry VIII.

He acquired smallpox in the year 1514 when he was 22 years old.

We know he had the disease at the time because the Venetian ambassador in England wrote back to his colleagues in Italy and informed them that Henry had acquired smallpox and recovered.

That letter has survived the centuries, and it's actually one of the first references to smallpox in England.

Several decades later, later, when Henry's younger daughter Elizabeth was queen, she also acquired smallpox, and it left pock marks on her face, and supposedly that's why she wore heavy white makeup after that point, an image which we still associate with her to this day.

Elizabeth's pock marks may have been noticeable, but some people were completely disfigured by them.

In fact, when Elizabeth got smallpox, one of her young nursemaids also acquired the disease, and she was so disfigured by the disease that she retired from public life after that point.

But at least she survived.

About a third of the people who acquired smallpox died from it.

Fortunately, a person only acquired smallpox once.

If the person survived, he or she had a lifetime immunity to the smallpox virus going forward.

Interestingly, smallpox was one of the first contagious diseases to be completely eradicated by vaccines.

And in fact, the word vaccine is derived from those events.

Here's what happened.

In the 1700s, another type of pox became common in England, called cowpox.

A lot of these poxes originated in animals and then passed to humans, and that's what happened with the cowpox.

It originated in cows, and then it started to appear in milkmaids who picked it up from the udders of cows.

But then an English physician named Edward Jenner noticed something very interesting about those milkmaids who had acquired cowpox.

It turned out that none of them ever became sick with smallpox.

And he realized that the cowpox virus was similar enough to the smallpox virus that immunity from one form of the virus extended to the other as well.

Since cowpox had much milder symptoms, it turned out to be a very effective way of preventing smallpox.

Jenner began giving people small doses of the cowpox, which then provided immunity to both diseases.

The Latin word for cow was vaca,

and the Latin term for cowpox was variole vacanae, or vacanae for short, using that Latin word for cow.

People received that vacanae, or cowpox, to give them immunity from smallpox, And vacuinae evolved into the modern word vaccine within French and English in the late 1700s.

So vaccine literally means cowpox, or something associated with cows.

Other vaccine techniques were developed over the course of the 1800s and 1900s, and in 1980, the World Health Organization officially certified that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet.

But it took five centuries to get to that point.

In the early 1500s, smallpox was still spreading across England, causing a lot of suffering and death.

And of course, smallpox wasn't the only ailment that afflicted people.

As I noted earlier, people clamored for medical books in English because sickness and disease were so rampant in Tudor, England.

Some of those illnesses are still common today, but others were unique to the period, with names that have largely disappeared over time.

A full list of all those ailments is too long to cover here, but let me mention a few of the common illnesses that plagued Tudor, England.

First, speaking of plague, there was the plague itself, the Bavonic plague.

It never completely went away after the Black Death in the 1300s.

It continued to reappear from time to time.

In fact, it was once again raging in London around the current point in our story in the 1530s.

And that's how the word plague came to be used as a verb, to plague someone.

It referred to a constant nuisance or danger that kept recurring.

Another common disease of the period was known as consumption.

It often involved a type of lung infection, and one of its main long-term symptoms was excessive weight loss.

The person would become thin and gaunt, and many victims eventually died from it.

It was as if the person's body was being consumed, and that's why it was called consumption, a term that's first recorded in English in the late 1300s.

The term might have been used for a few different diseases, but over time it specifically became associated with tuberculosis, and today consumption is considered to be an old word for tuberculosis.

By the way, over the last couple of episodes, I mentioned that Henry VIII had an illegitimate son named Henry Fitzroy, literally Henry, son of the the king.

Well, around the current point in our story in 1536, he died of consumption.

Now King Henry did have a legitimate son in the following year, which we'll get to a little later in the episode, and that son survived long enough to become king after Henry, but he also died very young from tuberculosis.

And Henry's father, Henry VII, also died from the disease.

So this was still a very deadly disease in the 1500s.

By the way, in the 1500s, someone who lost a lot of weight and became thin and gaunt was said to be brawnfallen.

That's B-R-A-W-N, hyphen, F-A-L-L-E-N.

Now during the Tudor period, there was a common disease that killed a lot of people known as the sweating sickness.

People who contracted the disease would get a high fever, then severe body aches, and then they would start sweating profusely.

It was often deadly, and in fact some historians think it's what killed Henry VIII's older brother, Arthur.

Anne Boleyn also came down with the sweating sickness in 1528 before she married Henry.

Henry sent his personal physician, Dr.

Butts, to treat her.

Now Henry was so scared of catching the disease that he fled to the countryside while Anne recovered.

Anne did recover from the disease, and her recovery may have proven to Henry that Dr.

Butts was a doctor that he could trust.

Medical historians are still a little perplexed by the illness.

It was mostly confined to England, and historians still don't know exactly what caused it.

It was also very short-lived.

It first appeared in the late 1400s, and it disappeared after the mid-1500s.

But during the early Tudor period, it caused a lot of deaths.

Another infectious disease of the period was the measles.

Of course we still have measles today, but it was a much deadlier disease back in the 1500s.

Today we have vaccinations and treatments that didn't exist back then.

Around the current point in our story in 1535, one of Anne Boleyn's attendants came down with the measles, and once again Henry fled London and sent Anne away to the King's Palace at Hampton Court.

So again we see how much Henry feared these infectious diseases that were common around London.

At the first sign of outbreak, he had it out of town.

Another common illness of the period was known as the falling sickness.

It was apparently called that because people who suffered from the condition often had seizures.

They would collapse to the ground in convulsions.

It was also called the falling evil.

Now today, the condition is known as epilepsy, which is based on the Latin term for the disease.

That term became common in English in the 1600s.

Of course, the people of Tudor, England also suffered from colds and flu.

The word flu is, of course, a shortening of influenza, but you might be surprised to find out that influenza is just the Italian version of the word influence.

There was once a widespread belief that diseases could be caused by the stars and by atmospheric influences, and in the early 1500s, it became common in Italy to refer to some disease outbreaks as influenza, meaning influenced by the stars.

The word finally made its way into English in the seventeen hundreds, in reference to a flu outbreak that began in Italy.

Colds were also common, and there are references to the ailment as a cold as early as the fourteen hundreds.

Of course it's derived from the word cold in the sense of the word as the opposite of hot.

The illness might have been called a cold because it produced symptoms that resembled long-term exposure to the cold.

Another theory is that colds tended to produce a lot of phlegm, and during this period people associated phlegm with cold.

So let me explain what I mean.

As I noted earlier, phlegm was one of the four humors that were a basic part of medicine during this period.

The four humors, or bodily fluids, were yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm, and it was thought that people became sick if those four humors were out of balance.

Each humor supposedly had two specific qualities.

It was either hot or cold, and it was either wet or dry.

Well, phlegm was thought to have the qualities of coldness and wetness.

So there was a basic medieval link between phlegm and those two qualities.

And that link may have led people to think of excess phlegm as a state of excess coldness.

And that may explain why such a condition was called a cold.

By the way, an accumulation of excess phlegm in the throat was sometimes referred to as flobbage in the early 1500s.

That's a term that was especially common in the north of England and Scotland.

Another general term for a cold in the early modern period was rum, spelled R-H-E-U-M.

It could refer to both a cold as well as the phlegm that was produced by the cold.

It comes from the Greek word rheuma, meaning something that flows, and specifically something that flows from the body.

The word was used to refer to the phlegm and mucus associated with a cold because it seemed to flow from the nose and throat.

The word is still used to refer to the dried gunk or crust that forms in the corner of the eyes while sleeping.

And interestingly, the word also exists in modern medical terms like rheumatism, rheumatic fever, and rheumatoid arthritis.

But those are all conditions that produce swollen and painful joints.

So what's the connection between a word that refers to the common cold and those words that refer to joint pain?

Well, it was thought that rheum, or mucus, drained from the head down into the rest of the body.

and it gathered in the joints where it produced swelling and pain.

So that's why all those words share that word room, meaning a flow or discharge.

By the way, a version of that same root word also forms the final part of words like diarrhea, gonorrhea, and hemorrhoids.

Those terms refer to the discharge of fecal matter, mucus, and blood, respectively.

All of those terms are based on Greek roots.

And the same Greek root also produced the Greek word rhythm, which refers to the flow of music.

By the way, that Greek root word also shares a common Indo-European root with the native English word stream, which refers to a flow of water.

So all of that means that words like stream and rhythm are actually cognate with medical terms like room, rheumatism, diarrhea, gonorrhea, and hemorrhoids.

They all have to do with a specific kind of flow or discharge.

Another common medical condition that people have experienced across the centuries is a headache, and more specifically, a migraine.

The words head and ache are both Old English words, so it probably isn't surprising that the term headache goes all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons.

That other term migraine appeared in the 1400s as late Middle English was evolving into early modern English.

And that word migraine has an interesting history.

First of all, it's another Greek word.

The reason why so many of these elements have Greek names is again related to the idea of the four humors, which was fundamental at the time.

Most medical concepts at the time were based on the theories developed by those ancient Greek writers, so the elements tended to be given Greek names, and migraine is yet another example of that.

The Greek word hemi meant half, like in the word hemisphere, which literally means half of a sphere, and cronion meant skull.

It's the source of the modern word cranium.

Well, when you put those two words together, you get hemicronia, literally half skull.

It referred to the fact that a bad headache usually occurred in one part or on one side of the head.

Well, within French, the first syllable of that word was dropped, and hemicrania became migran.

And then it passed into English in the early 1400s, where the great vowel shift eventually altered the pronunciation to migraine.

But interestingly, some English speakers developed a different pronunciation of the word.

They altered the final syllable to grim.

So in the 1500s, the word was usually rendered as migrim.

They may have substituted the word grim at the end because a severe headache was a grim condition.

Also, at the time English had the native word gram,

which meant angry or fierce, and since migraines produced fierce pain, that word might have also influenced the change.

At any rate, in the 1500s it would have been more common to hear someone refer to a megrum than a migraine.

But over time the use of megrum declined, and migraine re established itself as the dominant form of the word.

Now speaking of headaches and migraines, that takes us back to Henry VIII.

As I noted in the last episode, Henry reportedly suffered from severe headaches during the second half of his reign.

Some scholars think the headaches were caused or influenced by several accidents which may have produced injuries to Henry's head.

Two of those injuries were incurred while jousting, which was one of Henry's favorite activities.

I mentioned those injuries in the last episode, and I noted that the last injury was the most severe one.

That was the jousting injury that occurred when Henry was knocked off his horse and the horse fell on him.

According to some reports, it left him unconscious and unresponsive for two hours.

In addition to the likely concussion he experienced, he also received a severe injury to his legs.

Henry had experienced leg swelling and ulcers on his leg a decade earlier, so his leg may have already been a problem, but regardless, after this particular jousting accident, his leg was never the same again.

Many scholars think the chronic pain from his leg contributed to his brutal demeanor in the latter part of his reign.

That jousting accident occurred in January of 1536.

At the time of the accident, Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, was pregnant.

Henry hoped that she would give birth to the male heir that he so desperately wanted.

But five days after Henry's accident, Anne gave birth prematurely and the baby was lost.

The stillborn baby was a boy, so Henry's physical pains were compounded by the mental anguish of losing his son and future heir to the throne.

Anne blamed the loss of the baby on the shock and stress she felt when she heard about Henry's accident.

It was a common belief at the time that a sudden shock could cause a miscarriage or a premature delivery.

But Anne didn't just blame the loss on Henry's accident.

She also blamed it on the fact that Henry had a new lover.

She had recently discovered that Henry was having an affair with one of her attendants named Jane Seymour.

It appears that Henry and Anne Boleyn's relationship had become strained over the prior year or so.

and just like Henry's first wife, Anne had failed to produce a male heir.

And the traumatic events of that January seemed to mark a breaking point in the marriage.

Henry felt that God was punishing him for divorcing his first wife so that he could marry Anne, and he increasingly viewed Anne as a temptress and a curse.

And he had already moved on to Jane Seymour, who would soon become Henry's third wife.

All of that meant that Anne Boleyn's days were numbered.

But before Anne was pushed away, there was another very important development that impacted the story of English.

Three months after Henry's accident, Parliament approved an act that Henry and his new Chancellor had promoted to secure the religious reforms that had taken place over the prior decade.

His new chancellor was Thomas Cromwell.

Cromwell had replaced Thomas More in that position.

Cromwell now became Henry's closest adviser, and together they took aim at the many monasteries and nunneries that were located throughout England.

It was felt that those institutions were still loyal to the Pope, and Henry believed that their presence undermined his authority as the self-proclaimed head of the Church of England.

Those monasteries also happened to possess a lot of wealth.

The Church owned about a third of the land in England, and at least half of that was held by monasteries, nunneries, and similar religious houses.

There were about 650 such houses in England and Wales.

Henry and his new Chancellor, Cromwell, planned to dissolve those institutions and confiscate all their land and property.

Henry could then turn around and sell the lands.

It would make Henry incredibly rich.

And there was also another benefit.

It was felt that the people who bought the lands would embrace Henry's religious reforms and oppose any return to the old order because they would want to protect their newly purchased properties.

That was the plan, and it was carried out with incredible efficiency after Parliament approved the process in April of 1536.

Initially, the law only authorized the dissolution of the smaller monasteries and nunneries, those with less than £200 of income each year.

But three years later, the process was extended to all monasteries and nunneries.

What resulted was one of the largest redistributions of wealth in the history of England.

When the religious houses were closed, the contents of the buildings were removed and destroyed, and the monks and nuns were kicked out to live among the general public to make a living as best they could.

The lead roofs of the buildings were dismantled and removed, and were used to make lead bullets for the firearms that were increasingly used by the English army.

Much of the timber on the properties was cut down and used to build ships.

Henry is generally credited with building up the English navy during this period, and the timber from monastic lands contributed to that process.

The confiscated lands were also sold off to wealthy magnates, as well as to merchants, lawyers, and other members of the rising middle class.

The dissolution of the monasteries is also very important to our story because of what happened to the libraries in those buildings.

As we know, books were written and copied by hand before the printing press.

and in earlier centuries many of those copies were made by monks and monasteries because they were some of the few people who were literate at the time.

So many of those religious houses had large libraries full of old handwritten manuscripts.

Many of those books were old books going all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and in many cases those books contained the only surviving copy of Old English poems and early pieces of literature.

But now, in the late 1530s, those libraries were raided, and most of those books were lost forever.

By way of example, Worcester Priory had 600 books in its library when the dissolution began.

Only six of those books are known to exist today.

The other 594 have been lost or destroyed.

And the Abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York had 646 books when it was dissolved.

Today, only three of those books survive.

Those numbers were repeated across the country.

Of course, many of those books would have been written in Latin, but certainly there had to have been a significant number of English books as well.

And it's very likely that many of those books were destroyed because they were written in Old English.

Very few people would have been able to read Old English in the mid-1500s, and they may not have even recognized the language as an early form of English.

So they probably saw no real value in those books.

If they couldn't read them and they didn't recognize the language, then why keep them?

And that may be the saddest part of the story.

The parchment in those old books was valuable separate and apart from what was written on it.

There are reports that many of those old manuscripts were taken apart, and the parchment used for drum skins, roof insulation, drink coasters, and dust covers for printed schoolbooks.

The parchment was also a good material for cleaning and polishing, so the pages were also used to clean gun barrels and polish candlesticks.

The material was also used as liners and stoppers for barrels of beer.

A book collector named John Bale traveled around the various monasteries before they were dissolved, and he took an inventory of many of the books in those libraries before they were destroyed, and his work gives us a vague idea of what was lost, even though his inventory doesn't provide much information about the actual contents of the books.

Several years later, after the dissolutions were completed, he wrote of the people who purchased the properties, quote, A great number of them which purchased those superstitious mansions reserved of those library books, some to serve their jakes,

some to scour candlesticks, and some to rub their boots, some they sold to grocers and soap sellers, end quote.

So in that quote, he mentions that the parchment in the books had been used to clean boots and candlesticks, but most insulting of all, it had been used to serve their jakes.

Jakes was a slang term at the time for a toilet, so the pages were used as toilet paper.

By the way, for what it's worth, these events coincided with the first recorded use of the word toilet in the English language.

It's a French word that appeared for the first time in an English document in 1538.

Previously, people referred to it as the privy or the Jakes.

It was also sometimes called the House of Easement or the House of Office.

The words latrine and bathroom appear in writing for the first time in the following century.

But whatever it was called, John Bale tells us that it sometimes contained pages from old books after the dissolution of the monasteries.

The bottom line is that a significant literary heritage was lost when the monasteries were dissolved in the late 1530s, and for many historians of English, that was one of the most significant developments during the reign of Henry VIII.

But the dissolution of the monasteries wasn't the only important event that began in April of 1536.

A little more than a week after Parliament passed the Act which authorized the dissolution of the monasteries, the Queen of England was accused of adultery and treason.

Of course, the Queen was Anne Boleyn.

The accusations were made by various people with connections to the royal court, and they largely consisted of innuendo and hearsay.

But eight men were soon arrested and accused of having affairs with Anne Boleyn, including Anne's own brother.

For centuries historians have debated the extent to which there was any truth to these accusations.

On April 24th, two separate commissions were established to investigate the accusations.

Numerous people around the royal court were questioned, including Anne's attendants and ladies-in-waiting.

One made reference to Anne's closeness to a court musician named Mark Smeaton.

He was arrested and soon confessed to having an affair with Anne, but it isn't clear if the confession was voluntary or obtained through torture.

Then it was revealed that Anne had a private conversation with a prominent member of the royal court named Henry Norris.

Supposedly, she had flirted with Norris and suggested that he might want to marry her if Henry died for any reason.

Well, it was treason to even discuss the king's death.

Then the wife of Anne's brother came forward and reported that Anne had insulted Henry behind his back by saying that he had neither skill nor virility as a lover.

Anne's brother had also alluded to this by openly joking that Anne's daughter Elizabeth might not be Henry's daughter, thereby implying that Henry was impotent.

And that's really the key to this whole controversy.

There was an extreme double standard in the royal court.

The king could have as many affairs as he wanted, but there couldn't even be a suggestion that the queen was having an affair, because that brought into question the legitimacy of the queen's children, and therefore the legitimacy of the royal succession.

People would start to wonder if the heir to the throne was really the legitimate child of the king.

The mere suggestion of illegitimacy could lead to civil war, so it couldn't be tolerated, especially by Henry.

Today, most historians agree that there's no evidence that Anne actually slept with her brother, or most of the other accused men for that matter.

In fact, it's very possible she never had any affairs at all.

But it also appears to be true that she was careless in her actions and her words, and she didn't use the discretion that she needed to use around court.

There are also suggestions that Anne disliked Henry's new chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, and Cromwell might have orchestrated the whole investigation as a way of getting rid of Anne before Anne could convince Henry to get rid of him.

But the bottom line is that Henry was tired of Anne.

He felt that he was cursed by having married her, and it suggested that he even thought she was a witch.

She didn't provide him with the male heir he wanted, and last but not least, Henry had already moved on to Jane Seymour.

So it was time for Anne to go.

Now I should note that three of the eight men who were arrested and accused of having affairs with Anne were acquitted and released, but the other five were executed, including Anne's brother and the other two men I mentioned.

Anne herself was arrested in early May, and she was beheaded a couple of weeks later on May

Henry's eagerness to get rid of Anne seems to be confirmed by the fact that he married Jane Seymour just eleven days after Anne was executed.

Jane's formal coronation as queen was scheduled for September, four months after she married Henry, but the coronation had to be postponed because the plague was once again raging in London.

It was rescheduled for the following month, but at that point a rebellion broke out in the north of England, largely in response to the dissolution of the monasteries.

The rebellion became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and after some initial successes it was brutally put down by Henry's forces.

That rebellion and the ongoing plague in London prevented the second attempted coronation of Jane Seymour in October, and in fact she never had a formal coronation.

But there was no doubt about her legitimacy as queen.

Anne Boleyn was dead, and Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was also dead by this point.

Catherine had died of natural causes earlier in the year.

So Jane was now universally recognized as Henry's legitimate wife.

And that was important because any male heir born to the marriage would also be seen as the legitimate heir to the throne.

A few months later, Jane became pregnant, but the fetus wasn't considered healthy and viable until the mother felt it move.

At the time, the term for that movement was quickening.

It was based on the original sense of the word quick as living or alive.

In an earlier episode, I talked about how the word quick evolved from the sense of alive to the modern sense of fast.

That original sense of the word as alive can still be found in the phrase the quick and the dead, meaning the living and the dead.

It can also be found in the term quick sand, meaning living or moving sand.

And in the early 1500s we find the first use of that term quickening to refer to a baby's first movement in the womb.

For Henry it was a cause for celebration.

There was a Latin hymn of praise called Todeum, the name being derived from the opening lines of the hymn, which meant the God we praise.

Well, Henry ordered the hymn to be sung in the churches of England to celebrate the baby's quickening.

The rumors that Henry was impotent proved to be wrong, at least for now.

Five months later, Jane gave birth, and it was exactly what Henry hoped for, a baby boy.

Henry finally got the male heir he wanted.

The boy was named Edward after Edward the Confessor, and for the first time Henry seemed to have everything he desired.

He had a queen that he apparently loved.

Of his six wives, she was the one he was eventually buried beside when he died.

He had a male heir, which he had wanted for over twenty-seven years since he became king.

And his power over the country and the Church of England was unparalleled.

He didn't have to answer to anyone.

But his satisfaction was short-lived, because sickness soon returned to the royal court.

A few days after giving birth to baby Edward, the queen became sick.

Her condition gradually worsened, and a few days later she died.

Edward was only twelve days old when his mother died, and historians still debate the specific cause of death.

The conventional view is that she died from bleeding or an infection associated with childbirth.

But a letter from her attending physicians suggests otherwise.

The letter indicates that Jane was doing well for the first four days after the delivery, but then she experienced a quote natural lax.

While some historians have interpreted that statement as bleeding, the word lax actually referred to loose bowels or diarrhea.

It's derived from a Latin word that meant loose, and the same root actually gives us the word laxative.

The medical sense of the word first appeared in English around this time in the early 1500s.

Previously, people in England referred to the condition as the flux.

The description of the Queen's symptoms as lax suggests that she was suffering from something other than postpartum bleeding.

Some scholars have even suggested accidental food poisoning, which was quite common at the time.

After Jane's death, Henry's physicians barely got any rest, because a short time later, Henry himself became sick.

Henry's problems involved his legs.

As I noted earlier, he had problems with his legs a decade earlier.

Then his horse fell on his legs in that jousting accident.

Now, a year later, Henry's legs began to swell, and he started to develop ulcers on both legs.

The ulcers were large sores, and they soon became infected and started seeping.

The condition was extremely painful, and it hindered Henry's ability to move around.

Henry's physicians tried to deal with the sores on his legs as best they could.

That included Dr.

Butz, who I mentioned earlier.

It was decided to open the infected wounds to let them drain, and his physicians decided to keep the sores open to allow the drainage to continue on an ongoing basis.

Henry's condition soon became known throughout the country.

He had to delay a trip to meet with the Duke of Norfolk.

Henry wrote to the Duke and informed him, quote, to be frank with you, which you must keep to yourself, a humor has fallen into our legs, and our physicians advise us not to go far in the heat of the day.

⁇

Now Henry may have asked the Duke to keep the news to himself, but the news got out anyway.

There are several surviving letters from foreign ambassadors and people close to the royal court that make reference to Henry's condition.

They refer to Henry's sore legs, or to fistulas, or open wounds in his legs.

Around this same time, a couple of Henry's distant relatives were charged with treason and plotting to overthrow the king.

One of the accused men reportedly referred to Henry's leg problems and poor health.

The accused relative, one Henry Pohl, also known as Lord Montague, reportedly said of Henry, quote, He will die suddenly, his leg will kill him, and then we shall have jolly stirring, end quote.

As you might have guessed, both of the accused men were executed.

By this point, it was becoming difficult to keep track of all the people Henry had executed for treason, and the deaths deaths showed no signs of slowing.

So it's easy to see why so many people feared him, and his poor health wasn't helping his demeanor any.

As Henry's sores became infected, they filled with pus.

Today we refer to that condition as an abscess, a Latin term that's recorded for the first time in English around this point.

When that type of sore seeped or leaked, the people of Tudor, England called it the running of the reins, and infected sores or wounds often produced a fever, which was a common term at the time, but a fever was also called an ague.

Ague often referred to a fever produced by malaria, but it could also be used more generally.

Another term for a fever, especially a malarial fever, was a quartan.

That term was based on the Latin word for four because it often reappeared every fourth day.

And speaking of fevers, the people of Tudor, England relied on a variety of treatments to reduce a fever.

Of course there were herbal remedies and special concoctions, but many people still believed in the healing power of words.

And there was a very old word that was thought to have special healing powers, especially for someone suffering from a fever.

That word was abracadabra.

The use of the word to ward off sickness and disease goes all the way back to the ancient Romans.

It can be found in Roman medical books as a cure for fever as early as the third century AD or Common Era.

Supposedly, the word had to be written out several times.

It was written out fully on the first line.

Then immediately beneath it it was written out again but without the final letter.

Then underneath that second version it was written out a third time without the final two letters.

That process continued on each subsequent line, removing another letter each time, until all that was left was the first letter A.

So when written out this way, the word abracadabra at the top was tapered down to just the letter A at the bottom, and it produced a triangle-shaped charm that was worn on the body to ward off a fever.

Presumably it was still being used in England in the mid-1500s because the first reference to the charm in English occurred around that time.

In the year 1565, an English clergyman named James Cathill made reference to the charm in a book called An Answer to the Treaties of the Cross.

In a section of the book where he defended the use of certain holy relics and charms, he noted that the Church tolerated the use of holy trinkets because they gave people comfort, and it was a pagan tradition that the Church co-opted in order to convert the people to Christianity.

Then, making reference to one of those charms, he wrote, quote,

May we not suspect that there's some piece of truth more than we are aware of, some piece of secret operation in the word abracadabra to heal one of the fever, end quote.

That's the first reference to the word abracadabra in English.

Of course, it was later appropriated by magicians, where it continued to be associated with magical transformations.

The origin of the word is disputed.

Some think it's derived from a Hebrew or Aramaic phrase.

Others think it's derived from the Greek word abraxis, which also had religious connotations.

But whatever the origin, it's been around for a long time, and it was still being used as a charm in Tudor, England.

Of course, King Henry's physicians tended to prefer more reliable treatments.

like special ointments and salves to reduce the infection that caused the fever.

And the recipe for one of those special salves is contained in that book of medical cures compiled by Henry's physicians that I mentioned earlier in the episode.

That was the book that's sometimes referred to as Dr.

Butt's Diary.

It contained the recipe for a variety of lotions, salves, ointments, and related applications, which were called plasters at the time.

Several of those remedies are attributed to Henry himself, and it appears that many of the treatments were specifically designed for Henry's ailments.

That's because there are lots of references to painful ulcers and sores.

There are specific treatments for humors or open sores associated with swollen legs, and also remedies for pain and swelling in the ankles.

All of that suggests that the medical book was compiled around this time in the late 1530s when Henry was suffering from the open sores in his legs.

Now I want to give you an example of the kind of treatments contained in the book.

This is a recipe designed to treat a fistula or open sore.

I'm going to read it in contemporary modern English first, and then I'm going to read it in its original 16th-century English.

Here's the modern version:

Take four ounces of heart's suet, or deer fallow, and a half pound each of rosin and parisin, and four ounces each of white wax and frankincense, and one ounce of mastic, which is resin from the mastic tree.

First, measle or mix the heart suet and the wax together, then reduce the gums to powder, and put it thereto, and when they be relented all together, strain them through a piece of canvas into another vessel, and put thereto a pottle or half gallon of white wine, and set it over the fire again, and boil them to the consuming of the wine, always stirring with a staff.

Then take it from the fire, and when it's almost cold, put thereto four ounces of fine turpentine well washed with white wine, and two drams of camphor well powdered.

Then make it up in rolls and wrap them in parchment.

This plaster is good for wounds both new and old, for bruises, and for aches, and it does mundify or cleanse ulcers and old sores without pain, and is good both for fistulas and for causes that be ulcerate.

Now, here's the original version in the English of the sixteenth century:

Tech Haratis suit far onces, Rossen Perisin of Etch Hafenpond,

wet wax, frankincense of etch far onces, mastig own uns

forest meso o' the hurritis suet, and then wax together.

Then poulter the gomas, and put there too,

and when they be relented altogether, strand them through a pace of canvas into another vessel, and put thereto a portal of white wine, and set it over a fire again,

and boil them to the consuming of the wine, always stirring with a staff.

Then take it from the fire, and when it is almost cold, put there two far ounces of fine turpentine,

well wash it with white wine, and two dramas of camphor, well poultered,

then make it up in rolls and wrap it in parishment.

This plaster is good for wounds, both new and old, for brusers, and for archers, and it doth mundafe ulcers and old sores without pain, and is good both for fistilas and for culses that be ulcerate.

Now, it's difficult to say just how effective these types of treatments were, but it does appear that Henry's condition improved after a year or so.

Nevertheless, his legs continued to bother him for the rest of his life.

It was difficult for him to walk, and his physicians designed an early type of wheelchair which allowed him to be moved around with greater ease.

He also gained weight at a rapid rate, presumably because he was no longer as active as he had been a few years earlier.

By 1540, the references to Henry's sores decreased, and Henry was looking to marry once again for the fourth time.

It was also in that year that Henry made one last important contribution to the development of medicine in England.

In 1540, he combined the Barber's Guild and the Surgeons Guild into one combined organization called the Company of Barber Surgeons.

Now this development was significant for a couple of reasons.

First, as I noted earlier in the episode, there was a great deal of overlap in the services provided by the barbers and surgeons.

In the competitive and largely unregulated environment that existed prior to this point, both groups routinely performed surgeries.

Again, it was considered a type of manual labor.

Physicians might recommend a specific surgical procedure, but they didn't actually do the surgery themselves.

They brought in a surgeon to do it, because it was considered to be a type of manual labor.

Physicians worked with their minds.

Surgeons worked with their hands.

And in fact, the word surgery literally means handwork, or manual labor.

It's another Greek word.

It combines the Greek words ker, meaning hand, and ergon, meaning work.

That Greek word for hand is also also found in the word chiropractor.

Well, by putting those two Greek elements together, it produced the word chirogery, which was actually a common form of the word in early modern English.

It's the term that was generally used in many of the English medical books that were published during that period.

The word had been borrowed into English from French, but as the word passed through French, the initial consonant sound was sometimes softened to an S sound, and the initial syllable was sometimes slurred.

As a result, the word chyrgery was sometimes pronounced as surgery.

Both forms of the word existed in early modern English, but over time surgery replaced the older form chyergery.

Well, again, surgery was performed by both surgeons and barbers.

The procedures included a variety of operations, like lancing boils and abscesses, removing cysts, amputating limbs, removing kidney stones, treating and closing open wounds, bloodletting, and extracting teeth.

Well, the barbers and surgeons often argued with each other over which profession should be performing certain procedures.

Surgeons didn't think that barbers were qualified to do any kind of advanced procedures.

But when Henry combined the two groups into one organization, it meant that they were all subject to the same governing board.

That board was able to oversee and regulate both professions, and that meant that the services provided by each profession could be better regulated.

And over time, the new organization restricted the services that could be provided by each group.

Barbers were largely restricted to cutting hair, and surgeons were largely restricted to performing surgical procedures.

There was some overlap, though.

For example, both groups groups could extract teeth.

But the irony is that the merger of the two professions allowed them to become more distinct over time.

And in fact, in the mid-1700s, the two professions had become so distinct that the surgeons once again split off and formed their own professional organization, which became the Royal College of Surgeons.

The other consequence of this merger, orchestrated by Henry, is that the Organization of Barber Surgeons was allowed to receive the corpses of four executed criminals each year.

They were allowed to dissect and study the bodies to get a better understanding of how the body works.

They were the only bodies that surgeons were allowed to dissect, but it was a new innovation that significantly improved surgical procedures in the overall study of medicine.

At pretty much the exact same time in Italy, a surgical professor named Andreas Vesalius was also dissecting human bodies.

And he realized that the traditional descriptions of the human anatomy in those ancient medical books was sometimes incorrect.

And that's because those ancient descriptions were based largely on animal dissections.

When Vesalius dissected human cadavers, he prepared detailed drawings of the organs and skeletal system.

and those drawings were published in the 1540s.

Physicians and surgeons throughout Europe soon had access to the illustrations, and they became standard tools of the trade.

By proving that some of the traditional ideas about the human body were wrong, other traditional ideas also started to be questioned, including the concept of the four humors.

Of course, those developments took time, but they point to a gradual evolution in the practice of medicine toward a more modern scientific approach based on actual observation and study.

So as we enter the decade of the 1540s, physicians throughout Europe were beginning to reimagine the practice of medicine thanks in part to the printing press.

Meanwhile, the common people of England were reading books in English to improve both their spiritual health and their physical health.

As for the king, his health was finally on the mend.

and he was looking to marry for the fourth time.

In the next episode, we'll finally conclude our look at the reign of Henry VIII.

We'll explore his final three marriages, and we'll also examine one of the greatest collections of proverbs ever compiled in the English language.

That collection, compiled by John Haywood, contains the first known use of many of the common proverbs and idioms that we use all the time.

So we'll look at that important book as well.

Until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.