History Memes

tbf, most herbal cures weren't considered witchcraft. Witchcraft was more of a social state than one related to any of one's actual practices (ie "We want this old widow's property"), and didn't really ramp up until the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ironically.

De Materia Medica, a Roman-era pharmaceutical text, actually survived this entire period in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, because of its usefulness. Albeit you might struggle to find many areas of early medieval Europe with a copy on hand... or the requisite knowledge to make use of it...

Victorian England is one of the few slivers of history wherein things actually got worse for people overall because of technology - not so much out of the largely-fictitious idea that industrial labor was more arduous or less profitable than subsistence farming, but because industrialization led to the sudden and rapid concentration of populations in urban centers which were not really even designed for their own current population, and a low understanding of organizational and public health principles. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that London even started filtering its fucking water. I wouldn't drink straight from the Thames today, much less in a period when upstream sewage and pollutants were poured-in willy-nilly without treatment.