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Libluini posted:To my defense, this is what happens if you play JRPGs too much and then read some ancient battle accounts about ancient armies winning "because they had iron" while their enemies had bronze, it kind of burns Iron > Bronze into your brain. Interesting to know that those armies won because they had more of their equipment, not because it was straight-up better. It's also a common and easy to make misunderstanding. Bronze came before iron and iron largely displaced bronze when it was invented, so surely iron must be better, right? People don't consider the economics or may not know bronze is such a pain in the rear end to get the components for. It's not that weird of a concept once you know it though. There's a lot of consumer goods now that are shittier quality than what we used to have. Is that because it's better, or we forgot how to make the higher quality? Nah, it's just a shitload cheaper. If you don't care about it being disposable, or more importantly, the companies manufacturing it care more about the lower costs, it makes perfect sense to transition to lower quality goods.
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Oct 3, 2020 23:34
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It can be depressing though. Although an interesting rebuttal to the people who think that the progression of time is always for things getting better. The world's a weird place.
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Oct 3, 2020 23:46
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Terrible Opinions posted:You're probably thinking of Damascus steel, not iron. No, definitely not. That's more than a thousand years in the future from the time I was thinking of. PittTheElder posted:There's also meteoric iron which was used to make tools and such way before the iron age proper, but they were extremely rare prestige items for fairly obvious reasons. That must have been it! Re: Cheapness, cheapness isn't always "worse". If it means you can make your army twice as large as your enemy because the same amount effort equals twice as much equipment, that's a form of strength right there that's hard to beat. There are also a lot of consumer goods that only became available to the masses because they could be made cheaply. Think about Nintendo's Game Boy: If only very few highly paid craftsmen could make them with the best available materials, they could have been a lot better, but at the cost of only the richest of the rich being able to afford one. That would be a sad world. I call this the Nintendo Theory of ancient economics.
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Oct 4, 2020 00:26
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Did Rome have to come up with a new system for producing arms and armour when they switched to the state equipping the legions?
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Oct 4, 2020 00:30
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Did Rome have to come up with a new system for producing arms and armour when they switched to the state equipping the legions? Yeah. Rome's armies had been the traditional type, you brought your own equipment. Once the state was supplying it (this was a gradual process not overnight) they had to maintain legionary workshops then later massive factories that churned out arms, armor, other standardized equipment like bags and fort pieces, blueprint books, precisely engineered siege weapon components, military rations, on and on and on.
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Oct 4, 2020 00:43
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Libluini posted:No, definitely not. That's more than a thousand years in the future from the time I was thinking of.
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Oct 4, 2020 01:17
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Libluini posted:Think about Nintendo's Game Boy: If only very few highly paid craftsmen could make them with the best available materials, they could have been a lot better, but at the cost of only the richest of the rich being able to afford one. That would be a sad world. I know that the gameboy had some challengers with higher specs, but it's still legendary for its durability. That's kind of the biggest complaint I've seen about newer technology, between more breakable plastics and generally just the intention for things not to get maintenance or repairs so that people buy the next model sooner, things are less durable. I actually wonder whether European goods got an extra focus on durability or reusability with the fall of the empire and the decline of widespread mass production of goods. I don't really know much about technology changes between 500 and 1000, or my knowledge jumps geographically to different groups that never had access to Imperial resources in the first place. I guess non-technologically, the places that maintained higher population density had to deal with more epidemics from the development of disease.
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Oct 4, 2020 01:25
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PittTheElder posted:And mail is still such a collosal hassle to manufacture that nobody in media production wants to deal with it. I'm blown away by how much the LOTR films made. if you look closely a lot of productions set in medieval times will use wool knit that kinda vaguely approximates mail if you squint. Looks like this:  faux stage plate today then is often made from aluminum instead. Since aluminum is considerably softer than steel its a lot easier and quicker to form. It tends to be implausibly shiny though compared to real steal, since it doesn't rust and whatnot. In fact i'm pretty sure that chinese armor we were talking about earlier is aluminum.
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Oct 4, 2020 01:25
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Is this the thread for medieval history? I have a question. When did colleges begin teaching engineering? First western college to do it was probably the Czech Technical University in 1707..
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Oct 4, 2020 01:43
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Aluminum is also much lighter which is good for having to constantly take multiple takes wearing it.
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Oct 4, 2020 01:48
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Is this the thread for medieval history? I have a question. When did colleges begin teaching engineering? Ooh that's actually something I know about, although it's very much not medieval. There was a huge crisis in universities ca. the 18th - 19th centuries about how to fit in grubby "technical" education. Something like mechanical engineering really doesn't fit inside the old model of the trivium or even the liberal arts. Like it KIND of fits under the sciences, but it's applied sciences, not trying to discover the mysteries of the universe. Meanwhile everyone wants to hire people who know how to design a steam engine that won't fly apart or make a bridge that won't fall in the river. And these people need to learn a lot of the basic skills of math and logic etc. that universities teach. But how do we fit them into the academic framework? Is it possible to be a doctor of engineering? So on the one hand you have all of these very lucrative modern professions that need certification, but on the other hand they don't fit into the traditional doctor/lawyer/priest/philosopher mold of the old universities. People want to hire these people, other people want to pay for that education, but how the hell do you fit them into what amounts to an academic guild system? Worse they don't have the old traditional guilds to provide a framework. If you want to be a shoemaker in 1770 there's a millennia-old established way to sort that out. Not so much if you want to figure out a better process for casting steel. This poo poo was a huge bone of contention in European academia for the better part of two centuries. Eventually you have a kind of parallel system emerge with polytechnic schools providing what we would broadly understand as engineering educations. In Germany you start seeing this in the late 18th century. One of the first was the Freiburg University of Mining, set up in the mining regions of Saxony. There's an ongoing academic dick waving contest over just how a TU measures up to a Uni that runs hot all through the next two hundred years and is still ongoing to some extent today (see: the usual sniping you'll see about "Cow Colleges" in the US and others sneering at main stream University of State as not actually teaching useful skills).
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Oct 4, 2020 02:15
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Libluini posted:No, definitely not. That's more than a thousand years in the future from the time I was
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Oct 4, 2020 03:06
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Who had the best medical care in the ancient/medieval world? Like if had to be airdropped in and suffer some horrible disease/injury who do you choose?
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Oct 4, 2020 03:56
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Lawman 0 posted:Who had the best medical care in the ancient/medieval world? drop me in the gladiator locker room please. if it's a wound, anyway
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Oct 4, 2020 04:11
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Lawman 0 posted:Who had the best medical care in the ancient/medieval world? Injury? I'll take a Roman surgeon. Disease? You're pretty equally hosed everywhere.
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Oct 4, 2020 04:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:There was a huge crisis in universities ca. the 18th - 19th centuries about how to fit in grubby "technical" education. Something like mechanical engineering really doesn't fit inside the old model of the trivium or even the liberal arts. Like it KIND of fits under the sciences, but it's applied sciences, not trying to discover the mysteries of the universe. on this topic, in Rising Tide, John Barry talks about how hard it was to get levees built and make the Mississippi actually navigable year-round, in large part because civil engineering as a profession barely existed. in the early 19th century in the States it was almost exclusively the Army Corps of Engineers, and how you got into the USACE was to be the top person in your class at West Point. which, as you might imagine, does not produce very many engineers! so it's not really until after the Civil War that the talent pool + capital starts to exist to do some of the huge projects that were necessary. found the quote: quote:Until the 1830s, West Point dominated American engineering. West Point offered the only academic training in the field in America, and Army engineers were a true elite. Only the top two cadets of each West Point class were allowed to enter the Corps of Engineers, while only the top eight cadets in each class could enter the separate Corps of Topographical Engineers. (Humphreys had fallen short of this mark but, after establishing himself as a civilian engineer, the corps commander personally selected him.) eke out fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 04:36
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Lawman 0 posted:Who had the best medical care in the ancient/medieval world? It really depends on what kind of medical treatment you need: Rome had actually excellent surgical care, and you'd be better off at one of their Galenic military hospitals than anywhere in history until the advent of the American Red Cross during the Civil War. Their midwives were top-notch as well. Greece formulated the concept of the trained medical doctor. A Hippocratic physician was so much better than the self-taught healers that came before him, and their system of continuing education and multidisciplinary expertise was absolutely critical to the development of the field. Egypt implemented the first recipes for effective medicine (though the beneficial aspects of honey, wine, and vinegar, and boiling likely had to fight against counteractive ingredients like feces) and it would take a long time before their treatments would be significantly improved upon. China instituted excellent therapeutic care fairly early on, and their techniques for symptomatic relief (including acupuncture, cupping, massage, and homeopathy) remain quite effective at treating chronic conditions. India founded some of the first schools of psychological care and treatment, long before the idea of mental and philosophical well-being entered into western medicine. Kaal fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 05:42
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Kaal posted:
Homeopathy isn't Chinese, and the modern form of acupuncture with the very thin needles is very different from the traditional practice. All are clinically useless and often actively harmful.
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Oct 4, 2020 06:31
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eke out posted:on this topic, in Rising Tide, John Barry talks about how hard it was to get levees built and make the Mississippi actually navigable year-round, in large part because civil engineering as a profession barely existed. There was a similar thing in the post-Civil War U.S. Navy. The top graduates from each year at Annapolis tended to go into either the Constructor Corps (read: ship designers and builders) or the Civil Engineering Corps. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 07:04
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Right now I’d say the Merchant Marine Academy is the closest to that traditional Service Academy engineering education. But I’m biased.
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Oct 4, 2020 07:07
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I'd actually suspect that your best to be sick in the ancient world is anywhere where they'll leave you to rest for a while but also bring you water and food instead of fooling around with emetics, bleeding, and cabbage.
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Oct 4, 2020 07:34
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If we're talking disease then yeah you're probably better off not being anywhere near a doctor lest they fill your eyeballs with mercury until the pus demons fly out of your rear end in a top hat or whatever the gently caress.
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Oct 4, 2020 07:41
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I'll buck the trend and take a chance at medieval France, Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy. Prayers won't help my illness, but they probably have the best altar wine.
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Oct 4, 2020 07:46
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I am being comedy, there were some effective disease treatments that premodern cultures figured out through trial and error. Some herbal stuff that turned out to actually be antibiotics, that kind of thing. Still, in general disease fighting before we understood what disease was and how it worked was... questionable, at best. Dealing with injury was a lot more straightforward and Roman doctors who got to train with the army/on gladiators were often very good at it. You'd have a hard time telling apart a Roman surgeon's kit and a modern one. There are also scattered references to antiseptic practices like heating surgical instruments/cleaning them with hot wine or vinegar. It's not clear if those were widespread or not, but if they were then you'd also have a much better chance of avoiding infections from surgery.
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Oct 4, 2020 07:52
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Fun fact: after anesthetics were discovered, deaths from surgery went up because doctors became more willing to suggest surgery and the deaths from shock were more than replaced by the deaths from infection
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Oct 4, 2020 08:01
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Kaal posted:
Fun fact: The egyptian doctors were often specialized. Ir-en-akhty, a doctor described in an ancient inscription, for example was a proctologist and was given the title "neru pehuyt" (Shepherd of the Royal Anus).
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Oct 4, 2020 12:11
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I know that some cultures had worked out some treatments or medicines that actually worked for some diseases, but it'd probably be up to luck whether you come down with something that there's a real cure for. And if I've learned anything from the Sawbones podcast, one of the most popular attempts at cures was whatever makes you barf, because then it has an observable effect. Maybe what'd be best is some place that has good preventative practices, and all I can really think for that is I've heard of people in Egypt getting sand in their bread and slowly grinding down their teeth, so not there.
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Oct 4, 2020 15:18
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Iirc dental health was an area where egyptians really lagged, and we have quite a few mummies who probably succumbed to complications from tooth problems.
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Oct 4, 2020 15:33
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PittTheElder posted:And mail is still such a collosal hassle to manufacture that nobody in media production wants to deal with it. I'm blown away by how much the LOTR films made. IIRC they used plastic tubes, cut into roundels. The resulting rings opened and then glued shut with cyano acrylate. It was cheap, light and fast as anyone with a spare moment could be productive with a moment's instruction.
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Oct 4, 2020 15:59
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Grand Fromage posted:. Dealing with injury was a lot more straightforward and Roman doctors who got to train with the army/on gladiators were often very good at it. You'd have a hard time telling apart a Roman surgeon's kit and a modern one. There are also scattered references to antiseptic practices like heating surgical instruments/cleaning them with hot wine or vinegar. It's not clear if those were widespread or not, but if they were then you'd also have a much better chance of avoiding infections from surgery. While Roman surgery was pretty good, especially when it came to bonesetting and the removal of foreign matter from wounds, it still usually came down to amputations.
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Oct 4, 2020 16:15
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Grand Fromage posted:I am being comedy, there were some effective disease treatments that premodern cultures figured out through trial and error. Some herbal stuff that turned out to actually be antibiotics, that kind of thing. Still, in general disease fighting before we understood what disease was and how it worked was... questionable, at best. Yeah, it really, really can't be overemphasized just what a game changer for human health germ theory was. If you get into military medicine the number of deaths from infection in the ACW is just nuts compared to what you see even twenth years later. Joseph Lister made the connection between germ theory and surgical tools (note that the surgeons grubby hands are a tool in this regard) in the late 1860s and it had become fairly widespread by the end of the 1870s. Needing surgery in 1865 was a very loving different proposition than in 1875. Edgar Allen Ho posted:Iirc dental health was an area where egyptians really lagged, and we have quite a few mummies who probably succumbed to complications from tooth problems. It also doesn't help that they apparently had a lot of wear on their teeth. Something about small amounts of sand getting into pretty much everything, including bread dough, and wearing down teeth relatively quickly.
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Oct 4, 2020 16:20
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Epicurius posted:While Roman surgery was pretty good, especially when it came to bonesetting and the removal of foreign matter from wounds, it still usually came down to amputations. Still basically does. The amounts of amputations in the gwot are huge. But the survival rate is high
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Oct 4, 2020 17:57
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vuk83 posted:Still basically does. The amounts of amputations in the gwot are huge. But the survival rate is high It basically comes down to wound type. If a long bone is essentially pulverized or there's massive damage to the major blood vessels etc. there isn't much modern medicine can do. You see a lot of these kinds of injuries with explosives, so if you have guys walking around getting IED'd you're going to see a lot of them. I seem to recall something about vehicle drivers losing a lot of legs because IEDs would push the bottom plate of the crew compartment up and basically smash the foot. You see similar treatments if someone has their foot crushed in an industrial accident. After a certain point there's just not much you can do to fix a blob of crushed meat and bone. I suspect that a lot of the injuries legionaries took wouldn't need amputation today. Amputation works because you're essentially turning a complex wound into a simple wound. The complexity of the wounds that we are able to deal with today and still save the limb is massively improved over what it was even 50 years ago, much less 2000.
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Oct 4, 2020 18:31
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And I'm counting "you lost your leg but survived" as a success here. Yeah it'd be great not to lose the leg, but it'd be worse to die. We know from skeletal evidence that Romans did pretty radical surgical procedures that patients survived. The fact that we have that evidence suggests the survival rate wasn't bad--it's unlikely we'd just happen to find all the people who recovered, it's probably more representative than that. You gotta compare to the era. Modern medicine is so radically, absurdly better than premodern that if you're judging what they did based on what we do then it's pointless. Sometimes Romans get portrayed as the only people with decent medicine, which isn't true, but especially in the realm of surgery they had excellent abilities for the time.
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Oct 4, 2020 18:52
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Grand Fromage posted:And I'm counting "you lost your leg but survived" as a success here. Yeah it'd be great not to lose the leg, but it'd be worse to die. We know from skeletal evidence that Romans did pretty radical surgical procedures that patients survived. The fact that we have that evidence suggests the survival rate wasn't bad--it's unlikely we'd just happen to find all the people who recovered, it's probably more representative than that. When it comes to surgery modern is absolutely better, but it's not the night and day orders of magnitude poo poo that you see with the treatment of illness or chronic diseases that are medicated. My father is a retired surgeon and he's got an interest in historical surgery, and I've sent him accounts of old stuff that he basically says is more or less the same way we do it today, only absent the anesthesia and sterilization procedures we use now. I'm blanking on the exact one now, but I think the last one was actually one from this thread. I'd still opt for a modern surgeon no question, but it's pretty amazing that a modern professional can look at old instructions and go "yup, that's how you do that." edit: It was a vericose vein surgery described by Galen. I'll copy it over after I dig it up on my old texts with him. Galen posted:
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Oct 4, 2020 19:11
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Grand Fromage posted:And I'm counting "you lost your leg but survived" as a success here. Yeah it'd be great not to lose the leg, but it'd be worse to die. We know from skeletal evidence that Romans did pretty radical surgical procedures that patients survived. The fact that we have that evidence suggests the survival rate wasn't bad--it's unlikely we'd just happen to find all the people who recovered, it's probably more representative than that. Do we know (or, more, can we estimate) what the survival rate for amputations was among the Romans was in comparison to their contemporaries? And do we know, for example, what the survival rate for amputations were among the Romans compared to the post-Roman west?
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Oct 4, 2020 19:13
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Surgery being similar makes sense since it's not like the human body has changed. But proper antiseptics and antibiotics make surgery so much safer to do now that I think the difference is significant, even if there's more of a straight line there back to the ancient world than there is with disease, which changed entirely with germ theory.Epicurius posted:Do we know (or, more, can we estimate) what the survival rate for amputations was among the Romans was in comparison to their contemporaries? And do we know, for example, what the survival rate for amputations were among the Romans compared to the post-Roman west? I'm sure there are papers trying to tackle this but I don't know them.
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Oct 4, 2020 19:20
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One aspect of surgery that has really changed is that Romans couldn't go nearly as deep as we can, particularly because they lacked knowledge of fundamental anatomy. Limbs and surface surgeries don't require it, but it took until medieval doctors started doing exploratory autopsies to be able to differentiate organs and their function.
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Oct 4, 2020 19:35
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If you try to do anything too fancy before anesthetics, the patient is likely to just die of shock from the pain, or the infection afterwards. There were plenty of cases where surgery could be theoretically useful, but doctors wouldn't recommend surgery because your chance of survival were higher with no treatment than risking surgery.
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Oct 4, 2020 19:58
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I'm reminded of that scene in Rome when Pollo got wacked behind the head and he's getting cranial surgery. Can you imagine going through this, awake?
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Oct 4, 2020 22:28
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