Was a bit tempted...

[oursin]

Well, actually, after I had already sent the email to the media researcher saying 'not a historian of early modern medicine', and not saying, 'so not about the What did they really die of thing', the thought occurred to me -

- that with a very minimal amount of mugging up, me and the Famous Shirt could probably go on telly and sound pretty authoritative in a brief soundbite.

(Telly researchers, by the way, never seem to google anything, otherwise they might have twigged that the C16th is not my patch, and deaths of people around the monarchy, not that either. But even though I try to eschew watching history programmes, even in the ones I've been in I have been moved to ask the heavens, 'Y O Y did they ask X to say anything on this subject?' Sometimes they are even visibly struggling. So perhaps as long as they can describe a person as 'historian' it doesn't really matter what they are a historian of.)

Also, I think that 'different theories of what the actual cause of death was' does not amount to 'controversy', rather that simply that there could be several possible explanations. When a woman dies some days after giving birth following an arduous labour, I don't think we need to start invoking sinister conspiracy. Maybe there's a desire to know The Real Facts but even if we had the contemporary case records, whether these would decode to anything that we could define in modern medical terminology, Clio alone knows.

Comments

[untonuggan]

Yes. This. All of this.