The monks lived in stone compounds, with lush gardens full of fresh fruit and vegetables to enjoy – far healthier than the mushy, boiled porridge concoctions the average villager ate for dinner every night. They also had access to proper toilets with running water, while peasants relieved themselves in bowls or outdoor cisterns. And yet, a new study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology found that medieval monks were full of intestinal parasites—almost twice as many as everyday people. “This really surprised us,” lead author Piers Mitchell, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told As It Happens guest Susan Bonner. “The basic levels of hygiene and cleanliness in a typical monastery or monastery should, in theory, have been much better than we would find among peasants living in the city.”
You are what you eat
For the study, Mitchell and his colleagues examined the remains of 19 people discovered in a medieval Augustinian monastery in Cambridge, UK, and compared them to 25 bodies buried in a nearby parish cemetery. But instead of studying the bones directly, the researchers examined the soil on and around the pelvises, where the intestines would once have been. “When they decompose, any gut or parasitic worm that would have been in those guts, their eggs would still be left in the soil that we can study using a microscope,” Mitchell said. A member of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit excavates the remains of medieval Augustinian monks. (Cambridge Archaeological Unit) Of those buried in the parish cemetery, 32 percent had intestinal parasites—particularly roundworms and whipworms—which Mitchell says is about on par with what experts would expect for medieval populations in Europe. But among Augustinians, 58 percent had intestinal worms. Even these numbers are likely an underestimate. The study notes that some traces of worm eggs in the pelvic sediment would have been destroyed over time by insects and fungi. “If it has to do with hygiene, and if monks and nuns had latrines and better sanitation, then it might be the way they handled their crops that would explain it,” Mitchell said. Mitchell and his colleagues theorize that the monks would have used their excrement to fertilize their vast crops, as was common at the time, causing them to become repeatedly reinfected with parasites. The average farmer, by contrast, would have only a small plot of land with a garden — if he was lucky enough to have any farming at all. In addition, the poorer people of medieval Europe, he said, commonly ate a food called a casserole—a type of stew or porridge made from grains, cereals, herbs and root vegetables boiled into a porridge and served with bread. Monks, on the other hand, munch on fresh salads full of uncooked produce. “And so cooking … is much more likely to kill parasites than if you had fresh fruit and fresh vegetables and salads and so on,” Mitchell said.
They didn’t know what they didn’t know
Today, the World Health Organization recommends that human excrement used as fertilizer be composted for six months beforehand. In this way, most pests will die. But, of course, medieval monks could not have known this. Piers Mitchell is an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. (Submitted by Piers Mitchell) Mitchell says there’s plenty of evidence that people in medieval times knew they had intestinal parasites. Medical texts from that period describe them in detail. What they didn’t know, he said, is where they came from. “They had no idea that faeces could transmit parasitic worms. They thought that these worms were spread or created by an imbalance of the four juices that people had in their bodies, as they understood medicine at the time – phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and And if they were out of balance or had too much of one of them , then diseases happened,” he said.
Lessons for the present
Findings like these, he says, not only shed light on how people lived, but also help us “understand the benefits of all the modern health care we have today.” “A lot of people take health for granted and say, ‘Oh, we don’t need vaccines or we don’t need to wash our hands and I don’t need to bother washing myself or brushing my teeth’ or those kinds of things,” she said. “If you study populations in the medieval period … you start to see evidence of all these diseases that we take for granted as being really rare or not affecting us today. not just at home, but also when traveling to parts of the world that don’t have the luxury of good hygiene that we’re all used to.” Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Kate McGillivray.
