[MR] what would life have been like....

[Karen]

Medb asked:

> A friend and I were talking the other night and she made a comment of what she
> thought her life would of been like with a cleft lip in SCA time.  It got me 
to
> wondering the same.. would she have been treated as a lesser child or left
> to live or die in whichever way she could? Has anyone knowledge on this 
>subject?

It depends on the severity of the cleft lip, and what resources would have been 
available to her parents (economic level, what time period, etc.).  A severely 
cleft lip can create problems with feeding a baby (especially in circumstances 
in which breastfeeding is the only option), so she may have starved to death as 
an infant.

But there are other options available in various cultures.  Some infants were 
fed from spouted vessels -- see 
http://liberfloridus.cines.fr/cgi-bin/affich_image?05534,d,31283,EjxHs608052245,4,1,1,2
 for an example (though this shows an ape-mama feeding a kitten-baby).

Þorgils skarði, a Viking in the 10th century, is described as having a cleft lip 
(his descriptive surname means "hare-lipped"), so it's not impossible to imagine 
that she may well have survived to adulthood despite the condition.  (See 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~alvismal/4disfig.pdf for more on Þorgils skarði.)

Medieval medicine did have treatment for cleft lips, though; a late medieval 
English medical manuscript (Wellcome MS 564) provides one such technique.  It's 
excerpted at 
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&byte=72783145&egdisplay=compact&egs=72806018 --
 scroll down to (d) -- it refers to the condition as "hare scherd."

More on this topic (and some other remedies) in "Disability in Medieval Europe: 
Thinking about physical impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-1400."
http://amzn.to/aEgh77
http://books.google.com/books?id=alRZIEijOtgC&pg=PA103


Karen Larsdatter
www.larsdatter.com