Are you dead yet? - Help me kill students!

[lollardfish]

When I go interview at Willamette, I need to teach a 1 hour class. I'm going to do it on the Black Death, but first I want to play a game with the students. I call it, "If you were alive back then, would you be dead!" Better title suggestions gladly accepted.

I ask all the students to stand up, then I ask them questions about their lives, and tell them if they are dead or alive had they lived in the Middle Ages and make them sit down. This time it'll be for 1300, when actually nascent medical developments had improved certain things, like midwifery, to some extent. I try to end up with a few women and a few men left at the end, so I can kill some of the women in childbirth and some of the men in battle, and then tell the remaining ones that they could live to be 90!

It's unscientific. It's not based in hard medieval population data. It's an icebreaker. I need more questions though, and so I turn to you.

I ask:

1 - Who had a very serious childhood illness, so serious you've been told about it by your folks? Mumps, measles, bad chickenpox, etc. I kill about 25% off, but not too many. A nice chunk of people though.
2 - Who has broken a leg or an arm? I kill a few off from infection.
3 - Who has had appendicitis? I kill myself off (age 12! Oh, the humanity!)
4 - Who's been in a serious accident (car, bike, whatever)?
5 - Who has had a bad case of the flu lately?

I'd like a few more questions. Any advice?

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Is "Who was born prematurely" too intrusive?

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Probably. There are rules about such things. I might reference it and then not ask though.

[chirosinger.livejournal.com]

Type 1 diabetes (childhood onset) would kill off quite a few folks. A deep cut or puncture wound will kill off a few folks (infection/tetnus). Pneumonia would get a bunch.

[creidylad.livejournal.com]

Also, any childhood bacterial infection could have become meningitis.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I can talk about cutting grain. Hold the sickle in your right hand, hold the grain in your left, cut ... ack, I sliced myself!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

It's so easy to kill people!

Mostly controllable now:

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Asthma,
Diabetes,
Dysentery,
Pneumonia,
Food-poisoning,
Food allergies
Insect allergies

Re: Mostly controllable now:

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

mmmm. Allergies are a good one. I'm looking for evocative questions that can get me a kill without getting too many.

[chirosinger.livejournal.com]

Or squashing your foot or hand while working on a ship/dock. There's a famous case of tetnus that's still referred to from the Columbus exptdition.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Nice. Thanks. That's in.

[kalikanzara.livejournal.com]

I was going to post in faver of inheritable traits/birth defects, such as pyloric stenosis, but that is probably covered under illness.

I'm guessing you could kill some percentage of people who'd had major dental work.

Some percentage of those who have glasses or contacts may be more prone to accidental death due to vision impairments, maybe? That's probably a stretch.

Would there be any reasons for infanticide in 1300? I think that's probably too late for the practice.

I'm not sure exactly when the witch hunting craze caught on, but there are documented trials in the 1300s. You could just ask if anyone had ever been accused of having the evil eye.

Pregnancy complications and childbirth should kill a slice, and w/o birth control I figure that would mean there would have been more pregnancies.

You could get creative with travel hazards and just kill 10% of anyone who had travelled more than 500 miles to get to the college.

Oh, and looking at my user icon...

[kalikanzara.livejournal.com]

Get some of them with unwarned severe weather.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Infanticide continues into the modern era. I know a certain amount about it in 17th century France, for example.

I like the really bad vision issue.

Extraction of bad teeth was actually pretty good around 1300.

I like the travel hazards (weather) too!

And yeah, pregnancy always kills a chunk of the last women standing. Then I make one a nun and one a lucky multiple-married rich widow!

[jmanna.livejournal.com]

What about something like SIDS. Pick a random fourth of the class and tell them they didn't survive the first year for unknown reasons.

WHEEL! OF! DEATH!

[jbru.livejournal.com]

You could kill a percentage who self-identify as religious on the theory they'd be sent crusading or on pilgrimage.

A percentage who have done manual labor due to accidents.

A chunk that went to the bathroom before class because they got cholera or dysentary.

I'd kill 25% off right off the bat because they were probably all immunized agasin't childhood diseases.

Sounds fun!

Re: WHEEL! OF! DEATH!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

If you kill off too many too fast, you miss some of the end points. And I need at least a half dozen standing at the end so I can throw the plague bacterium at them.

Re: WHEEL! OF! DEATH!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I love the bathroom right before class trick. I'm using it.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Too many dead too fast, alas. I have to resist the urge to kill too quickly, I've found.

[jmanna.livejournal.com]

You could declare a few wealthier and kill them from lead poisoning or syphalis(sp) (rampant in the nobility of many european/English courts though that might have been later).

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Syphlis is a new world disease. The Europeans give the native americans smallpox. The native americans give the europeans syphlis.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking that you might want a handout or slide list of things that you can't ask outright--"Here are a few other things that might have killed off some of you."

Probably a certain percentage of those who have ever been treated with an antibiotic would have to be killed off, as some untreated infections would have been fatal.

One thing that strikes me is that one need not go back very far for a lot of this to apply. My maternal grandfather died of appendicitis in 1930, and a paternal uncle died of it (at age 8 or so) about that same time. And I probably would have died at age 3 if I had been born just a few years earlier than I was, before penicillan was available.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a lot of things that protect us now are /very/ recent.

The goal of the exercise in this case is to get them into the medieval mentality about life, and then talk about the Black Death. The reactions to the plague are extreme, but perhaps differently so than if it happened today. Death was a more omnipresent companion in the Middle Ages, and it took more, I think, to drive the society into a frenzy over a given problem. But when they frenzied, boy did they frenzy.

[rani23.livejournal.com]

Here's a somewhat tricky one -- any of them mothers or have ever had sex? Birth control wasn't terribly good and many women died in childbirth.

[chirosinger.livejournal.com]

And all of this to get your new stuffed toy? What a great scheme!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I can't ask that. I'll bring in childbirth though when I get to the ones who make it to adulthood.