History Forum / General / Archaeology / October 2004

Field for me wasn't like it was for you. When we had our training when there
was a manoeuver we in the group I belonged to always lived in a secret place
somewhere you know either here or there. One big difference was that we
always had a good cook and a canteen. Never had so good sauce in all my life
as I had in some of those places. Not even on a 3 star restaurant or better.
So we didn't have it your hard way or the way that most of the others had.
We had a kip to sleep a few hours in as well. Not one on each person but
still. No cold rain ever saw it to my face except the manouver when we had
to test the retrite ways. But once in 17 years(time I belonged to the
volunteer air force, one summer in a barrack only cold water) that's not
much.

Inger E

Could it be that whatever it is (BTW I know very little about autism) is a
reaction to the expectations we have of children at that age - i.e., this is
when they first make friends and begin to converse intelligently and interact
socially. It seems to be a sort of extreme introversion from what I've seen,
which may be a reaction to that.

As far as medieval attitudes went, Henry VI is a good example of what might have
been autism. Being a King, he was looked after carefully and with great respect,
and attempts were made to treat him, though details are sketchy.
Henry was a very nervous, highly strung individual, who wanted peace and
solitude above all, a most unfortunate job he was landed with! He went into
catatonic trances for months at a time when things became too much for him, just
shut off from the world and his senses, unresponsive and mute. He was however
highly intelligent and on occasions, quite animated when he came back to
normality. What was wrong with him I'm unsure, it is blamed on his ancestry
often (madness being traditional in the French Royals - his mother's side). I
suspect it was a chronic anxiety complex, which his situation would have greatly
exacerbated... poor sod!

King Charles of France suffered from another, very different condition - classic
'barking madness' - imagining he was made of glass and might break, delusional
and obsessional, probably paranoid schitzophrenia.

There are others mentioned who had mental illnesses, words like 'simpleton',
'imbecile', 'dim-witted' and 'dullard' are often used to describe those who
weren't sharp, witty, clever and slow to learn. The 'village idiot' appears
throughout history, and we have more than one in my village today! They did
however appear at all levels of society (as they still do), and the treatment
they received depended on their position, status and importance.

Mental illness wasn't really understood or even recognised, though they seemed
to have a good idea that it was inherited in medieval times. It was treated
symptomatically if at all, and thought in earlier times to be the result of
demonic posession etc.

I daresay any autistic in medieval days would have been savagely thrashed until
they paid attention, died, or became catatonic - I dread to think? We don't do
that nowadays, but I did see a documentary that showed people dealing with the
problem in a very similar (though not so brutal) way, through force, if not
quite pain. It can work it seems, but I don't know if medieval is the best way
to go... though who knows, it may have worked?
When was autism first recognised I wonder... and what was done about it before
that?

This could be a good thread I think... 'Medieval mental illness' - I might
repost it?
                Cheers
                        Martin

These maladies have been with us forever it seems,

In soc.history.medieval Kathy <kathy@slipknotland.demon.co.uk> wrote:

In the Middle Ages?  Depended on the strength of their
disability.  Some were treated as eccentric, others as
savants blessed by God, others as being possessed, and
still others as idiots.  

Often those with mental disorders were treated as especially
close to God.

And sometimes not.

  ---- Paul J. Gans

With any luck at all, *someone* will soon realize that
this discussion, while interesting, has nothing at all
to do with the subject line, and is off topic for the
FOUR newsgroups it is presently being cross-posted to.

And the reason is....?

Lloyd
*****

 You can't win in other words...
No, but we can improve the odds of avoiding disaster.

Neurologist Ramachandran and FMRI brain scans mite offer some clues on
how best to proceed. We see where kids have allergic reactions to all
kinds of things in their environment. Why would we assume that none of
the reactions would include mental effects, most especially since we see
how some pharmaceuticals can have powerful effects. Between the brian
scans and the biochemistry of the mind we see far more diversity.

I began working in a residential care facility with autistic kids in
1963, following the Bettleheim behavior approach. At that time, the
shrinks were telling the mothers that autism was caused by erratic
mothering. The guilt tripping just blows my mind.

Ten years later I was close with a young woman whose shrink told her
that her sexual dysfunction was an aspect of our relationship. But she
was, in fact, a DES baby, and the dysfunction was due to the cervical
cancer that killed her a year later. It not only was not all in her
head, none of it was in her head.

I myself struggled with bouts of peptic ulcers for years, and went into
therapy and group hoping for the insight that would minimize my stress.
I broke off relationships on that account, but now we all know that the
ulcers were caused by a peptic bacteria, and that a century of shrinks
telling people to reduce stress was bullschitt.

On reflecting about these three diagnoses, it occurred to me to consider
how a hundred years ago the mental health professionals were telling men
that masturbation caused insanity. 80 years ago they told couples that
pre-marital sex made for bad marriages. 60 years ago they were trying to
treak shellshock with couch time when now we know there are biochemical
reactions to the stress of battle, and 40 years ago it was still going
on in Vietnam. Ramachandran can show us the different way memory is laid
down while under duress or trauma. They were trying to cure it with
shock therapy.

20 years ago the APA still listed homosexuality as a mental disorder
that many of them said they could cure. But now we see the FRONTLINE
study showing how common it is for boys to be dosed with phyto-estrogen
in their fast food and supermarket meals. If we wanted lotsa gay males,
dosing them as boys with estrogen'd be one of the first things to try.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, shows how much more powerful our genes
are in determining who we grow up to be. He cites a study of identical
twins who were adopted out to different families. The geneologies which
show high rates of alcoholism or schizophrenia have suggested a genetic
link. But here, Ramachandran looks at a set of normal kids, and finds
that their personality profile results are very similar even though the
parenting differed widely in economic, political, and/or religious
traditions. He also looks at the kids who were adopted into the same
family, but these adopted siblings are no more like each other than any
random set of kids taken off the street.

And now we find the variety of the human genome aint what we expected.
There are 26 markers for Autism; markers for alcoholism, schizophrenia,
and many other deviations. The DNA code is *software*, and as software,
changing even one bit from the program string has powerful effects. We
have seen where male testes exposed to minute amounts of chemicals can
result in dramatically deformed children. Why then would we assume that
a boy growing up in modern culture, with a myriad chemicals, pollutants,
and pathological organisms, would not mature with sperm that tended to
have more subtle variations in what we think is normal, or that none of
these deviations would be psychological?

Likewise, with foetal alcohol or crack babies, we see where the uterine
environment was not right- so why would we assume that relatively normal
exposure to all the crap in modern life would not also seep into the
uterine environment and either have a powerful effect, or leave the kid
vulnerable to exposure of something else later?

Why do we assume that the ubiquitous colds and flus that we pass around
never have a psychoogical effect just because its not immediately
obvious? Havent we seen where the catalyst for catastrophy dont show up
for years later with more obvious physical cases?

Of course, even giving kids a clean environment and diet dont always do
much good. The anthropology reports repeatedly show us indigeneous
tribes in their natural environment with deviant personalities. But they
werent part of a nuclear family model, so it wasnt such a big deal for
the tribe to take care of them.

Gimbutas shows us coupled figures found in the Chalcolithic digs of SE
europe without comment. But looking at them, the sexual ambiguity is
obvious to anyone considering the question. Academic archaeology and
History have always known of the homosexuality of the Greeks and Romans,
but neither has tried to understand why it existed, or what the effects
were. NAMBLA would have had no problem in the greatest democractic
empire that was then in place. I wont argue the morals, but I note that
the assumption that the acceptance of Biblical law after Constantine in
the 5th century would result in better behavior... didnt actually leave
us with any history of better treatment or egalitarianism.

The forensic examination of the slave skeletons after Christianity took
over the empire- was actually worse than that under pagan masters. We
have the recorded comment of a Celt to criticism by a Roman, to wit she
said:"We Celts consort with the best of men in public, while yu
Christian wives do so in secret with the most vile.

The two most homorable Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Julian, were
not Christian, and the Christian emperors which followed used voilence
repeatedly. Gibbon comments on a French city full of the followers of
Bishop Arian, and how Constantine turned a blind eye while the forces of
Biship Athenasius butchered 40,000 'Christians' in a single day,
creating more martyrs than all the Christians killed by order of pagan
emperors in 200 years of 'supression'.

There may be some portion of the population which can practice faith in
an honorable way, the cognative dissonance of all the 'back sliders' and
other pretenders of morality stresses not only themselves, but their
families and the larger communities. Psychiatry has tried to ignore the
effects of religion on mental stability. But history shows us that faith
leads to conviction, which leads to zealotry, and in turn, to terrorism.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Neitzshe notes that Dionysianism was based
on works of theatre claiming allegorical truth, whereas the Levantine
tradition was based on works of literature claiming literal truth. Minds
that are unable to cope with the subtlety of allegorial truth prefer the
simple choices of a binary cosmology, good/evil, heaven/hell, blessed
and damned. We can teach a Down's syndrome to pray to Jesus for relief,
but we cant teach him to read Plato.

I was born in a multi-generational farmhouse in 1939; that kind of
nuclear family life goes back for millennia. But today, with a single
pair of parents and just one or two kids, relatively minor problems
stress them all out a lot worse. Kids have been raised for a million
years or whatever with lots of other kids in the home/cave/camnp, and I
dont think its been working out so well doing it differently.

The place was messy; outside there were chickens, ducks, dogs, cats,
cows and horses that schitt everywhere. There were the farming tools and
machinery parked in various places until needed, and several structures:
the outhouse, chickenhouse, smokehouse, house, barn, tool shed and corn
cribs. Then too, there's the pond, the creek, the trees, the brush, and
the wildlife. The point being, that there is a lot more diversity in the
natural environment than seen in suburban housing. No matter what the
kid has, autism, ADD, ADHD, gifted or retarded, ze has an instinct to go
and investigate, climb around on, watch, or chase. The world is less
abstract in the country. Kids that eat veggies they saw grow in a garden
get an understanding they dont get from Safeway (what an oxymorn!).

I was also a camp counselor for many years, and we all knew how the kids
loved the run of the place; they didnt need to wait for a car to drive
them to see a friend. It'd be interesting to see a year around camp for
challenged and challenging kids that their parents could live at while
they commute or telecommute to make a living. After the kid is adjusted
to Dear Camp, the parents would be able to take vacations knowing that
their kids are in a safe familiar place interested in their welfare.

Dear Camp would have the economy of scale to afford the machinery to
work the soil and grow healthy food; it'd have the social numbers more
like we were instinctively adapted to, with cooler heads always nearby
when arguments break out, and enuf kids to provide peer pressure needed
for better development. I grow many herbs, and I keep an eye out for
forensic reports on ancient pottery, iconography, and ancient texts for
clues to what other herbs might be important. The German Government
Commission E monograph reports on scores of herbs, tested scientifically
with double blind studies, which were effective therapies. I expect they
are continuing that work as we learn what the ancients were using.

Scientists are following the shamen into the jungles all over the world
looking for new cures now that we understand that their traditions are a
 lot more than just superstition. I sometimes wonder what was lost when
Native European witches were burnt along with their books. However,
another source remains in the Sogdian and Tocharian literature, and as
scholars become more familiar with these languages, I expect we'll hear
more about what herbal knowledge and procedures the Native Europeans
once had.

Too bad we cant have bases for all the kids. Leslie is similar, only 600
people live in town, and many kids still get to walk to school. I think
there are psychological studies which show that kids can recognize about
300 faces. After that, they havta rely on status symbols to know how to
relate to someone. and we all know the problem with status symbols.

And if we look at the ancestry of Native Europeans, we can see where 98%
lived in small villages of less than 300 souls. The ubiquitous timber
frame construction seen in Europe, it turns out has been found in the
tels of Rumania and Bulgaria that go back 8000 years. That's a *lot* of
generations to maximize the adaptation to a certain size of community.

It affects behavior. In the Leslie school, there's about 160 lockers;
but there's no doors on the lockers, much less locks. Everyone knows
which kid owns which jacket or boombox, or whatever. There is no one who
buys stolen goods. I've passed thru town at 3AM from a long road trip,
gone by the park, and there, below the basketball hoop, hangs the net,
and on the grass nearby... the ball. There's only one basketball court
in town, so nobody gets the idea to steal the ball.

Time again again, we see ancient writers comment that the cities are
cesspools of depravity, and the country people are hardworking and
honest. There seems to be a reason for that. The cities offer an endless
supply of easy targets, beginning as soon as a boy can run fast enuf
after stealing from a fruit stand. that dont work in Leslie; we all know
who each of the boys are.