The average life expectancy jumped from around 25–40 years to around 67 in the entire world, and to around 80 years in the developed world. They also protect us against countless daily aches and ailments, which pre-modern people simply accepted as part of life. Pills, injections, and sophisticated operations save us from a spate of illnesses and injuries that once dealt an inescapable death sentence. In the two centuries since Waterloo, things have changed beyond recognition. In those days, carpenters and butchers who enlisted to the army were often sent to serve in the medical corps, because surgery required little more than knowing your way with knives and saws. On the morning after the battle of Waterloo (1815), heaps of sawn-off hands and legs could be seen adjacent to the field hospitals. Before the advent of chloroform, four soldiers had to hold down a wounded comrade while the doctor sawed off the injured limb. The first anesthetics-ether, chloroform, and morphine-entered regular usage in Western medicine only in the middle of the nineteenth century. These amputations, as well as all other medical procedures (such as tooth extraction), were done without any anesthetics. In field hospitals doctors routinely cut off the hands and legs of soldiers who received even minor limb injuries, fearing gangrene. He died in great agony two weeks later.Īs recently as the nineteenth century, the best doctors still did not know how to prevent infection and stop the putrefaction of tissues. The gangrene spread through the Lionheart’s body and no-one could help the king.
The only way to stop the spread of gangrene in twelfth century Europe was to cut off the infected limb, impossible when the infection was in a shoulder. But in 1199, in the absence of antibiotics and effective sterilization methods, this minor flesh wound turned infected and gangrene set in.
Today we’d say he incurred a minor injury. In 1199, King Richard the Lionheart was struck by an arrow in his left shoulder.
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