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Do medieval shows only hire conventionally unattractive men? I always thought the convention was to have attractive people play important parts or “good” characters, regardless of gender, but admittedly I don’t really watch many medieval shows.
Witcher?
Game did a good job of having the ugliest polish man with a pitchfork in the town…
Then the local alchemist has a dump truck ass with eyeliner on.
If you’re talking about my girl Keira Metz, she’s a witch, not a standard alchemist. Woman definitely engages in performance enhancing magic
Had to look up. Got alchemist and herbalist confused.
It was tomira. I did remember the ass lol
I looked her name up on google and half the images are indeed about said dump truck lol
Tbh milkmaids were the prettiest women because they would get mild cases of cowpox instead of skin wrecking smallpox and it was the origin of the smallpox vaccine (vacca means cow in latin).
Huh I didn’t know humans could get mild cowpox
A great many pathogens can be “weakened” with various processes, heat is one, but also the surviving strains in a living being that beat the disease via immunity may also carry weakened strains and this is where we learned to deliberately contract smallpox via poking someone’s skin pustule and poking ourselves with that pus.
Gross but highly effective. This is how George Washington inoculated his army. (Which of course he learned about through a Reverend in Boston who learned about it from his slave, Onesimus, which makes sense as smallpox was ravaging Africa for over 10,000 years, they figured it out eventually.)
Thank you so much for sharing this interesting information.
And they had to be clean, so washed daily, and were always inside, in a very clean environment.
You are a milkmaid?
Edit: My joke was based on a corrected typo, “we’re”. IDGAF about online typos unless they have a humorous aspect. Cheers!
they’re both drunk, though. so that’s more than normal.
Alcohol would be considerably safer to drink than most water you could find
And it was way tamer than what we commonly drink now.
It was similar to Table Beer, iirc.
for consumption by children and by servants.
I don’t know what’s wrong with your toddler, he has barely touched his lager.
This is largely a myth. It would only apply to large cities, and then, the fresh water sources were frequently protected by law in cities.
Alcohol itself doesn’t actually destroy the pathogens in question- booze was made by microbes, after all, and as for bacterial… only beer and liquors was boiled, and simply adding it to already-contaminated water wouldn’t make it safer; since that only happens at much higher concentrations of alchohol than you’d find, even in liquors. It does inhibit bacterial growth, though, usually people were mixing booze into water to make things taste better. (Similar to how modern restaurants will frequently add lemon slices to cover the taste of tap water.)
in terms of maintaining hydration, alcohol- even weak alcohols- are very much not good for that, even 3% alcohols, particularly in high-heat or under activity.
Boiling water was discussed in Roman and Greek writings well before the medieval period, as well- mostly in the context of making it not taste funky; and usually they were talking about filtering it to remove contaminants (for example, near mining operations.)
Again, streams rivers flowing were generally safe for consumption and would only become unsafe as a result from urban pollution, of which, there were controls in place to protect at least some water ways and wells.
