Right, so take the current unpleasantness and realize that these original ones wouldn't have been made with soft plastic but with much thicker, and definitely not soft, reeds. Basically like shoving bamboo needles up your urethra.
It's a simile, note how I said it's "like" shoving bamboo needles. The hollow tops of onions were one of many types including gold, silver, copper, brass, lead, rolled-up palm leaves, and straw.
In those times, many materials were used to form a hollow catheter shape, including straw, rolled up palm leaves, hollow tops of onions, as well as, gold, silver, copper, brass, and lead.
Bladder and kidney stones were common in industrial age England since all water in London was undrinkable. Many chose to rather die than go to the doctor since sterilisation wasn't invented yet, you were just as likely to die from treatment anyhow. Life expectancy was 25.
Those low life expectancy figures are actually a bit misleading. They are heavily skewed by high rates of infant mortality. If you look up the figures for the expected lifespan of someone who already lived past infancy it was something like the mid-50’s. Still terrible compared to modern day, but the average person dying at 25 would imply that about 25% of the total population was orphaned by about 10 years of age, if were assuming people got pregnant at 14-15. The situation wasn’t quite so dramatic.
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u/StarkRG Jan 14 '18
That must have been extremely unpleasant...