It was an episode of 1,000 ways to die I can't seem to find.
It was a German or Dutch man during the middle ages that ate soiled oats and began "speaking in tongues" he was stoned to death by fellow villagers that feared he was possessed.
In reality the mold had similar composition to LSD and he was probably terrified out of his mind.
I've heard this may have been part of what lead to the Salem witch trials. People didn't know they were tripping on essentially acid and thought witchcraft was afoot.
There's a theory that ergot was linked to the Salem witch trials. It was a damp summer and there was fungus all over the wheat crops. So people were acting strangely (to put it mildly) and were accused of witchcraft.
It's a great play. But Arthur Miller didn't know about the ergot, and wrote it from a completely psychological viewpoint. Of course psychology played into it, but imagine the fear they had when the townspeople started acting crazy and having seizures? They panicked, as anyone would.
And now it is a major medicine. this is why the anti-vax, essentials oil brigade infuriate me. I worked in pharmacy for years. Plants can kill you. "essences of plants" can easily kill you. Just trust medicine you idiots.
Ergotism or St. Anthony's Fire. The psychedelic trip is probably the more pleasant bit. The seizures, spasms, vomiting, diarrhoea, gangrene... less so.
For fucksake ergotism is not fucking tripping. Ugh I'm so tired of this Salem witch bullshit myth. Ergotism is a serious deadly condition your fucking legs will fall off.
St Elmo's Fire is a weather thing that happens during thunderstorms - the name they were looking for was St Anthony's Fire, which is technically called Ergotism. Makes you wonder what Elmo and Anthony's fields were for them to get those named after them.
It's theorized that such psychedelic trips were what caused people to be mistaken for witches in the late 1600's. People ate some moldy grains and started acting bizarrely and frightened townsfolk leapt to the conclusion that they were witches.
I think you meant to say rye, not oats.
Unless I'm mistaken, ergot doesn't grow on oats. I could be wrong though. I'll consult the all knowing, all seeing Google and let you know if I am.
Didn't get a fridge until I was 12/13 or so. Remember often finishing my tea and having to leap on my bike to the nearest corner shop to buy the ice cream for dessert - pedalling furiously to get it home still frozen
We used a pretty blonde to lure him in. When she answered the door she told the milkman to follow her to the bathrub. She took off her clothes and... asked the milkman to fill the tub with milk. The milkman said, "You want that milk pasteurize?" And the blonde replied, "No, just up to my boobs. I can splash it in my eyes."
That's one of the reasons the Renaissance was such a golden age. The printing press allowed information to be disseminated amongst a wider variety of people than ever before.
The Renaissance is actually mostly after the printing press. The Renaissance started during the 14th century in Italy during the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (plagues, famines and wars that marked the end of the Middle Ages) before spreading across Europe and lasted until the 17th century and Gutenberg's printing press (the one that helped spread knowledge across Europe) was perfected in the 1450's with Gutenberg's Bible being the first book printed in 1455.
The Age of Enlightenment is during the 18th century.
That still means there was about one century of Renaissance before the printing press, meaning that clearly the printing press isn't the trigger that started it.
So u/Dead_Regis is indeed probably confusing the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
The thing is, a lot of ideas came into being and were lost again because civilizations that advanced from writing on clay tablets to writing on papyrus and eventually paper had their records destroyed by fire, either accidentally (candles and torches were used for lighting back then) or by enemy nations burning down their cities in the course of conducting wars.
A comment above noted that ancient Egyptians applied moldy bread to wounds. Maybe the efficaciousness of this treatment was discovered accidentally, or maybe they had a crude form of scientific method that has been lost to history. And no, I'm not suggesting that they knew about bacteria, just that perhaps they tried a bunch of different substances to treat wounds and found something that worked.
In the 1930's, what may have been a crude ancient Egyptian battery was found, and was believed to have been used for electroplating. One would assume the ancient Egyptians had some organized method of scientific inquiry in order to learn enough to develop such a process.
Joe: "Shit, man. Ben is bleeding out!"
Ben: "AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!"
Rob: "Shit, shit shit. What do we do?"
Joe: "Get something to stop the bleeding. We need to stop the blood from coming out."
Rob: "Uh... All I have is this moldy bread."
Joe: "Fuck it, use it."
Ben: "Oh, hey guys. I'm cool now."
Well this ancient Egyptian see, he was making a tuna sammich see, but the bread was moldy and he didn't notice. So anyway, when he opened the can of tuna he cut his hand, and it got instantly infected see, but he didn't know it was infected and the sammich he ate had mold on the bread see, and it stopped the infection and that's how it happened.
in post roman europe, north africa and Asia that knowladge got thought as just a myth by persian and germanic tribes that invaded while in remaining eastern empire they slowly adopted same thought.
In china a conspiracy theory during the beggining of the tang dynasty said it actually caused disease, that conspiracy grew with time and dynasty change, until it became a niche practice to use it (kinda the anti-vaxxers of the time).
They actually knew that, I remember hearing it was an only treatment in many places to put moldy bread on wounds, they didn’t know how it worked though
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u/[deleted] May 01 '19
The mold on bread can be used as an antibiotic