The Fevered Past

Patreon Link: https://www.patreon.com/TheFeveredPast

In 1392, the King of France rode out of a forest near Le Mans, killed four of his own knights, and had to be wrestled to the ground by his uncle. He was twenty-three. He had been on the throne for twelve years. He would remain on it for another thirty.

Charles VI of France, called the Beloved by his people and the Mad by history, suffered the first documented episode of what would become a lifelong illness in that forest. There would be more than forty further attacks over the next three decades. He would, at various points, fail to recognize his own wife, refuse to bathe for months, and run through the corridors of his palace howling like a wolf. He would also, famously, become convinced for a period that he was made of glass — and have iron rods sewn into his clothing to prevent himself from shattering.

The court physicians of medieval France could do nothing for him. 

Six hundred years of subsequent diagnosis has only recently done much better.

Creators and Guests

DB
Host
Dylan Barker
MR
Editor
Merandia Gifford, RN
Our medical sanity-checker for The Fevered Past.

What is The Fevered Past?

Some of history's deadliest killers have never been named.

The Fevered Past takes one medical mystery per episode - a plague, the unexplained death of a king, an epidemic that reshaped or annihilated a civilization - and works through it. What the ancient sources say. What modern science has been able to recover. Where the experts agree (or decidedly do not.) and where the honest answer is that we still simply do not know.

Some cases are famous. What killed Alexander the Great in Babylon? Some, less so: What was behind the Sweating Sickness of Tudor England, allowing the rise of Henry VIII and the Anglican Church, before suddenly vanishing?

Each episode opens with a scene placing you directly into the shoes of someone who lived through the period as an observer, lending a human perspective to events hundreds of years removed from the present - then, we begin our investigation.