How old is endometriosis? Late 17th- and 18th-century European descriptions of the disease.

UNLABELLED: DESIGN OF THE PROJECT: This study is the result of a detailed examination of numerous historical documents as well as several contemporary works describing endometriosis. The historic texts are housed in the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, and had not been unearthed previously. Those primary sources date from 1690 to 1797 and repeatedly describe the organic damage and constitutional symptoms currently identified with endometriosis. The biologic research for this study was done during 1997 and 1998 in the Pathology Department of the Canton-Potsdam Hospital located in Potsdam, New York. CONCLUSION(S): Endometriosis was described in European history approximately 300 years ago.

Life expectancy, infant mortality and malnutrition in preindustrial Europe: a contemporary explanation.

In Europe's preindustrial and overwhelmingly agricultural society, people did not in general live long lives. While there were exceptions, by our standards, life expectancy was appallingly low for most and almost inconceivable to a modern audience living in an advanced industrial society where longevity is constantly being revised upwards. Europe's impoverished past came to an end in the nineteenth century with the advent of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But before then, a great deal of suffering had taken place as Europe, as a whole, was plagued by a very high rate of infant mortality that significantly reduced, statistically, overall life expectancy. Clearly many of the sad deaths from the European past were tied to poor nutrition and the apparent lack of key vitamins, substances that modern researchers would consider as absolutely critical for proper cell development and amino-acid synthesis. In fact, it could probably be argued that Europe's preindustrial era was beset by a constant avitaminosis of some kind or another.

The coming of vegetables, fruits and key nutrients to the European diet.

On the basis of evidence now accumulating, vegetables and fruits were not always an integral part of the European diet. Prior to 1800, vegetables and fruits were not esteemed but rather looked down upon. It has only been over the past two centuries that these two critical foods have come into vogue. First, they had to be accepted by a growing number of medical men and observers. Then, once licensed as edible foods, vegetables and fruits, starting with the potato, actually did make their way into every man's diet. And by the end of the nineteenth century, these rich sources of carotene and Vitamins A, C and E became so universal that Europeans now forgot that a hundred years earlier these foods had barely been consumed.

Major medical explanations for high infant mortality in nineteenth-century Europe.

Statistics initially developed as a recognized field in the social sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century. The European medical profession first made use of mounting statistical evidence to dramatize infant mortality, one of the great social problems of the century. Those telling statistics amply demonstrated the general proportions of the problem as well as pinpointing the fact that a large percentage of the dying was neonatal in character. The medical profession also insisted that these infants were passing away from a series of ailments. Number one on their list was what they called debility, followed by respiratory disorders, gastro-intestinal problems, and convulsions. While nineteenth-century European medicine did not necessarily solve this social problem, it did evidently convince the larger society that these high tolls were morally unacceptable.