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[riznar]

Today I am very drugged from having my wisdom teeth removed.

Is the time period DF set in one with things resembling modern medicine?

Could you mill a plant or something and get a painkiller for instance?

[Starver]

More a time of "Herbal Remedies", I suspect.  Which means that it will have:

• Things that genuinely help, like teas made with certain types of bark that we now know supply medicinally beneficial compounds
• Placebos that nonetheless help because if the Wise Woman is telling you to take it (oh, and incidentally keep tucked up warm in bed), you're going to be Ok
• A number of quack remedies that are actually harmful, but are as often as not not as deadly as life in general, that anyone notices, or produce 'bad effects that are useful', like emetics
• Real off-the-wall stuff that these days (if not then) would be considered recreational mind-benders (and may help, hinder or otherwise distract from the normal recovery process).

I think we're before the "take this Antimony pill, and when it passes through your system you can wash it off and take it again" age of medicine, but without a collegiate system governing medicine, trial and error and personal learning with a little bit of inter-medic information exchange (which is what DF's skill system is currently made for!) is probably the overwhelming method of assessing treatment regimes.  Which means a few tried-and-tested (and not outright and immediately fatal) methods is going to be the order of the day.

In some ways, I'm surprised about the use of soap, in this era.  I know soap has been made (and used) for a long time, but (and I'm probably wrong about this) my knowledge of medical history seems to suggest that antisepsis precautions don't stretch that far back.

Of course, it could have been a lost art, that had been active at a DF-equivalent point of history but lost when the dynamics of knowledge changed.  Those very same Wise Women probably knew not to help deliver babies without cleaning their hands, and one of the 'early' pieces of evidence for the need for cleanliness was comparison of the ongoing welfare of delivering mothers and their babies between a female/nurse-staffed location and a male/doctor-staffed location, with the doctors having frequently come straight from the morgue where they'd been 'anatomising' recently deceased.  Including recently deceased women having died after childbirth from infections doubtless caught from the same cohort of doctors...

But back to DF, if they can't have the likes of carbolic vaporises, I doubt they'll get anywhere near the likes of antibiotics.  Though perhaps maggots being for wound-cleaning, and leaches to provide enzymes to assist fine tissue repair, given how these fairly recent re-emergences were doubtless (before being discarded or misunderstood by a whole swathe of medical generations) used with great effect by those providing practical healthcare in the pre-industrial world.

[Ovg]

You know anesthesia was born in 19th century, don't you?

It was "knock 'em out with whiskey and cut fast'' before. Also some tribes used marijuana, but it wasn't until laughing gas was first used that surgery entered "almost painless" era

Soap was used by those rich people who had people to prepare hot baths for them.

Medieval antibiotics were spider webs mixed with water, and since they contain penicillin, they helped when applied to wounds. (Please oh Toady One, this could mean our adventurers would have means to save themselves from infections).

People were just a tad tougher back then, but on the other hand a finger infection was almost certain death.

[Aramco]

but on the other hand a finger infection was almost certain death.

The other hand? Finger infection? Oh, I like puns too much. But this is a good idea.

[Rowanas]

but on the other hand a finger infection was almost certain death.

Not so. A gut wound, now that was certain death. They were advanced enough to cut off parts of limbs and have them unlikely to go bad in the 15th century. So, deliberate wounds were not much of an issue.

[Neonivek]

but on the other hand a finger infection was almost certain death.

Not so. A gut wound, now that was certain death. They were advanced enough to cut off parts of limbs and have them unlikely to go bad in the 15th century. So, deliberate wounds were not much of an issue.

Yeah a lot of the reasons why injuries were so bad is that the medical knowledge and resources weren't universally available. As well there weren't measurements of that much competency and surgeons could often be incompetent.

There was an idea of keeping a hospital clean as well as the instrument but it wasn't there in all places.

Thus you often got inept doctors with inept tools.

It is stunning to see how much knowledge they actually had back then but unsurprising how little we know about them now adays on average. A lot people seem to believe the Romans knew nothing about Lead Poisoning (which was false) or the English knew nothing, or little, about Scurvy.

But here is the thing

They were aware of scurvy for a very long time, the issue is that methods of transporting Vitamin C was expencive and limited (Fruits weren't cheap). THEN when they finally got the ability to transport it for long periods of time (Tin/Lead cans) they didn't know that Vitamin C could actually go away even in a preserve as well as long term lead exposure.. A long Delay in a voyage such as from storms makes Scurvy a real threat because the stores just don't last long.

[Starver]

....or the English knew nothing, or little, about Scurvy.

But here is the thing

They were aware of scurvy for a very long time, the issue is that methods of transporting Vitamin C was expencive and limited (Fruits weren't cheap). THEN when they finally got the ability to transport it for long periods of time (Tin/Lead cans) they didn't know that Vitamin C could actually go away even in a preserve as well as long term lead exposure.. A long Delay in a voyage such as from storms makes Scurvy a real threat because the stores just don't last long.

I thought the point was that we did know about the theoretical prevention of scurvy, hence us being called "Limeys", etc, by some other cultures.  If we hadn't have known, we surely wouldn't even have tried that preventive method.

You're right about the probably inadequacy about practical management, though.  The whole "acidic to-be-ingested liquid next to heavy metal" thing is very much a bad idea, in hindsight, but understandable by the limited degree of applied knowledge of the time, given how lead is very much more stable in more frequently encountered pH ranges.

[EvilMoogle]

Add "cauterizing irons" next to "amputation" on the additional medical tricks for Doctors.

[Neonivek]

I thought the point was that we did know about the theoretical prevention of scurvy

They did, but a lot of "we" don't for SOME reason.

Though I don't give "we" a lot of credit.

[Fidna]

You know anesthesia was born in 19th century, don't you?

It was "knock 'em out with whiskey and cut fast'' before. Also some tribes used marijuana, but it wasn't until laughing gas was first used that surgery entered "almost painless" era

That's rather oversimplifying. While alcohol was probably the first (very simple) anesthetic, there were actually quite a few developed and used in periods long before the 1800s. Opium, cannabis powders, etc. Opium was so commonly used that by the 13th century distant parts of Europe were both using it (they'd put it on a rag or sponge and use it to send a person into a delirious state; there's a Welsh monk who actually combined it with a strong wine, probably early brandy, to simply knock a man utterly unconscious). Mind, anesthetics had problems that modern ones overcame.

Like some people's tolerance for them would crop up at the worst possible time and now you have an awake, shrieking patient with a knife in his gut while you're trying to cut something like a tumor out of his bowel (that's how they did it then; went in through the torso and down), and shock sets in, and he dies. Or, because of the many different forms of measurement in use at the time, you don't actually understand the (possibly poorly) translated medical treatise you were educated with. That's how they taught; Greek and Arabic medical texts translated into the local languages or (more often) Latin, without accounting for differents in measurements of the medicines you're trying to make, meaning it was real easy to accidentally kill some one by giving them too much of a ad hoc drug.

Actually, that might be interesting. A combination of medical skills and a dwarf's innate comprehension skills keeping him from giving too much or too little of something before surgery as to avoid either killing them or having them come out of a daze/wake up while delicate work is being done. Within the cut off period for DF's approximated time line though, surgery actually can get pretty complex. My 1000 at least, there were brand new medical texts being made that weren't entirely based on Hippocrates and other earlier writers with just a little 'new' information thrown in; Abu Al-Qasim had written a very elaborate book on surgery that was translated into many languages and used in early colleges and universities to teach techniques to minimize bleeding, to knock a patient out properly, etc. Again, though, translation errors kind of necessitated using it as a base work in many regions and trying to figure out what had been screwed up by a scribe somewhere.

Medicine could be far more complex.