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

[David Chessler]

This raises a point that annoys me about this kind of question: The SCA covers
1000 years of history, and an area, continental Europe, that is as large as
the contiguous US (larger if you include other parts of the Mediterranean
basin). Almost anything might be true at some time or places, and very false
at others. 

Which is why I like an answer like the below: it limits its information to the
specific times and places where it was correct.

RANT MODE OFF:


--

YIS

Davitt il Bigollo da Pisa
Erudit de l'Academie de Espee de Atlantia
Storvik (rapier)
Roxbury Mill (other things) 
 
 
 ------ Original Message ------
  Received: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:45:44 AM EDT
  From: Karen <karen_larsdatter at yahoo.com>
  To: The Merry Rose <atlantia at atlantia.sca.org>
  Subject: Re: [MR] what would life have been like....
 
 
 
 
    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
     
     
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