What Getting Sick Inside a Medieval Castle Was Really Like (1316)

In the winter of 1316, the second year of the Great Famine, the heir to an English castle wakes up with a fever. This is the nine days that followed, reconstructed from the medicine of the time: the household remedies the lady of the castle kept, why the priest had to come before the physician, how the barber chose the night to bleed, why a rider carried a flask of urine through the snow, what a university physician looked for in it, and what happened to the people in the castle who were sick and had no physician at all. This is a reconstruction. Where historians disagree, we tell you, on screen. The same castle, one year earlier, the winter the bread ran out: https://youtu.be/Sqi8mZjR3HY The castle in an ordinary winter: https://youtu.be/qB4S5rXfMjk The warmest room in the village below: https://youtu.be/L6TM_Fhqq5A Chapters: 0:00 Cold Open: The Flask 1:05 One Year Later 2:10 The First Shiver 3:27 The Lady's Book 6:02 The Body They Believed In 7:32 The Priest Comes First 9:20 The Flux 11:28 The Barber 13:48 The Rider 15:39 The Stable 17:57 The Physician 19:31 Reading The Flask 21:07 The Regimen 23:14 A Birth In The Snow 24:31 The Seventh Day 26:06 What Saved Them 27:56 The Accounts 29:11 The Medicine Cabinet 29:36 A Reconstructor's Note Sources & further reading: - Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (1995) - Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1998) - Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 1990) - John of Gaddesden, Rosa Anglica (English medical compendium, early fourteenth century) - Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 22, on the physician of souls - Monica H. Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (2001) - William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996) - Manuscript images: physician receiving urine flasks (medieval manuscript, public domain); urine chart from Johannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicinae, 1491 (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0); bloodletting man and the zodiac (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0); a woman healer with a urine flask, early 14th century (Wellcome Collection, CC0) How this was made: every script is researched and written for this channel, every scene is designed for the sentence it illustrates, and the castle you see is a composite built from the records above. Images and narration are AI-generated from our scripts. If we got something wrong, tell us in the comments. The best corrections end up in the next reconstruction. New immersive history every week.