General Chat

d. He was driven from men and ate grass like oxen: There is no corresponding record of this seven-year (seven times) period of insanity in the secular historical records of Babylon - exactly as we would expect, considering the customs of that time. Nevertheless, Abydenus, a Greek historian, wrote in 268 b.c. that Nebuchadnezzar was "possessed by some god" and that he had "immediately disappeared." (Wood)



i. Some dismiss this account of Nebuchadnezzar's madness as unhistorical, but there is no historical record of his governmental activity between 582 b.c. and 575 b.c. This silence is deafening, especially when we keep in mind how Near Eastern leaders liked to egotistically trumpet their achievements - and hide their embarrassments.



ii. "Although critics have imagined a series of incredible objections to accepting this chapter as authentic and reasonably accurate, the narrative actually reads very sensibly and the objections seem trivial and unsupported." (Walvoord)



iii. Nebuchadnezzar was given the opportunity to humble himself, and he did not. Now God humbled him, and the experience was much more severe than it would have been had Nebuchadnezzar humbled himself.

It isn't really for us to judge how illness was described and treated in the past. The doctors had to work with knowledge as it was. When people in the future look back on what we take as the present day they will no doubt think some of our treatments and diagnosis where equally bizarre.

Andy

very sad, but never the less on the record.

A much, much older event is recorded in the OT
King Nebuchadnezzar was humbled to eating grass.

there WERE doctors then :-)


From: Purple Secret. Genes, 'Madness' and the Royal Houses of Europe. (published 1998)

His physician Sir George Baker was so worried by a meeting with the King on 22
October 1788 that he described George's condition as "bordering on delerium". By late November 7 royal physicians were involved,and arguing as to the cause and prognosis of the KIng's illness.

It was the doctors who described him as mad ...............

of course they had no idea that what we now call porphyria was the cause for his intermittent bouts of madness

Very good answer Rambling Rose :-D :-D :-D

Their wives? ;-)

Excuse me, I ap0ologise, I should have asked who had the authority

OK I understand
On a historical note I wonder who had the balls to call HenryV1 and
George111 mentally infirm?

I agree with MM

that's true ..................

the infirmity is ALWAYS specified, and is what the informant told the enumerator .... the informant usually being a parent or occasionally a neighbour. And neighbours in those days usually knew almost as much about the family as the parents :-)

When the forms were taken back to the central "office", the information was transferred into books, and the person doing that transferring would tick in the last column to indicate that the line had been completed.

This checking is why you often see big black marks elsewhere on the forms, or a person's occupation with a correction or addition in another hand.

David, I wish you would go back to those census forms that have a tick in that column just to see if they were indeed made by the enumerator to denote those born out of the county, I have never seen a tick in that column to denote an infirmity, usually an infirmity is specified.

If you delve deeper and look on sites such as the FamilySearch site, a child born out of wedlock was referred to as "Bastard Child"

Now we refer to them as illegitimate or simply, born out of wedlock.

Distasteful words in this day and age...but those were the words used back in those days.

but the medical profession used those terms ............ they were the terms in use, and the person had probably been diagnosed as that.

There were no other descriptions that could be used.

even the wealthiest person who had a mentally challenged child, and who could afford the best doctors would be told "he's an imbecile". Even they would be told that an older person was a lunatic.

That's waht we've been trying to tell you!

Those WERE the words that were used then.


Diagnoses have changed even in the time I've been alive .........

........ not that many years ago, we talked about Mongolian children. Now we know how wrong that was, they are people with Down's Syndrome, and many of them are capable of living very active productive lives. No-one thought that even 40 years ago!

Now go back another 100 years ........ and these children would have been called idiot or imbecile.

Thank you all for adding to my thread on this subject.

I felt that that form was asking for too much personal medical information
information they were not qualified to give.

imbecile lunatic feeble minded idiot back words and mongrel

there just all old medical words

if we reverse them with the words we use in today world would
we then think that

Autistic downs syndrome dimenture ect

is the wrong words to use

medical words change all the time
and it down to the research we have in to days world
better medical staff better equipment and more money

Guess that's the way it is

JUDGE NOT THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED it says somewhere, how profound

A lot of my ancestors were coal miners in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Indeed the last of the miners only died recently.

My grandmother's grandmother life was changed when her husband was killed in a mining accident. She had six children to feed and no idea what to do next There was no such thing as welfare support.

She broke down completely and spent the next 20 years in Sneinton Asylum. Her children ended up with rellies. It was only towards the end of her days that she went to live with one of her grand children. Despite her location and the census form she was not an idiot.

As Sylvia's excellent post says we cannot judge by modern mores.

`
Thank you for your replies I appreciate your views.
Never the less I find making these choices must have either
too easy or daunting.

Some of the terns used today would be as an insult.

David ..........

you have to stop thinking of those terms with today's eyes ......

they often meant different things, people were blunt with what they said. They called people "imbecile". They called them "feeble minded"

A woman could be put in an asylum because she suffered from post partum depression, or PMT, or refused to have marital relations with her husband, or refused to marry whoever her father wanted, or had an illegitimate baby ............ they would then be classed as imbecile or mad or a lunatic, or a syphalitic lunatic.

But remember, those were the only terms they knew! They didn't have all the diagnoses that we have these days.

Yes, we all know that those terms are not used today, that the GP would refer people to "specialists", and hopefully the patient will get in to see the specialist and get the treatment .............. but remember those diagnoses and treatments have all been discovered / developed / whatever you want to call it in the 20th Century.

Most people couldn't even afford to go to a doctor in the 19C, and even found it difficult in the 20thC before the NHS came in in 1947.

The only place to get free medical care was actually usually in the hospital run by the local workhouse ......... that's why you so often find babies born in the workhouse. Not because the mother was in the workhouse itself, but because she had gone to the hospital section to have her baby, probably because she needed a little more care than she could otherwise get.

You really should read about the old days, and see how far we've come, while learning to accept that we can't change what the enumerators put on those forms. People used those terms, those terms were accepted as normal.

Sometimes a tick was made in that last column by the enumerator to denote those that were born outside of the county.
In the case of an infirmity it was usually named in that column Example: "imbecile from birth".

I missed a category, feeble minded, what's the difference :-S