In which her protagonist makes his point

[zeborah]

I do feel it only fair to say that it wasn't actually my idea for my protagonist to knowingly put himself into serious danger of physical harm. I was as surprised as anyone when events transpired as they did. So really it's not my fault that he ended up with some broken ribs. He could have stayed in the Blue Tower if he'd wanted to. I'm just saying.

It's also not my fault that, as near as I can tell, opiates have fallen into disfavour in the time period he lives in. (Happy to be proved wrong! But I will require citations.)

I haven't deprived him entirely of painkillers. I just haven't been able to figure out what kind of painkillers he'd have, so on the assumption that a) they'd have something and b) it'd taste bitter I've mentioned vaguely that his servant has put something bitter into his wine for him.

Anyway. So then I got onto the next chapter in which he gets tortured a bit more (again, not my fault. He could have fled to Germany. I'm just saying) and... when my characters are tense, I'm tense. It's kind of like method acting sort of; it's partly subconscious and partly my way of remembering that these people aren't just talking heads, they also have body language.

And then on Sunday I discovered I'd pulled an intracostal muscle in my lower back. (And then on Sunday evening my sisters made me laugh. A lot. *Glare*.) And I thought I'd sleep on my back Sunday night, but that made my back go into little spasms which were more funny than painful but still didn't seem conducive to sleep. And I slept restlessly (complete with a dream about climbing up a cliff-face to get away from the tide coming in. Tide coming in = time running out ie no more holidays for me as I was back to work today. Then I got to the top of the cliff to discover that this was one level of Hell down, thousands more to go, and the only advantage of this one over the first was that it had supplies of toilet paper, and getting out of Hell was going to be an infinite slog of climbing, getting whatever supplies this level had, climbing more, etc).

And this morning my back hurt more, and the joggling of the bus on the way to work didn't help, and it was, all in all, really awesome when it turned out that a colleague had a wheat pack in her locker. So I've been heating and using that all day and my back's still tense all over but it'd be a heck of a lot worse if I hadn't been. So, though it's more uncomfortable than painful, as the bus joggles it on the way home I am coming around to the point of view that for actual broken ribs, painkillers would be totally awesome.

(ETA prior to posting: I stopped by the chemist on the way home. "Sure," she says, "we've got anti-inflammatories, but come over here and the pharmacist will give you the good stuff." Which he did along with a disclaimer that if it makes my asthma worse I should, y'know, stop taking them.)

So. Does anyone know what painkillers a Danish nobleman in 1527 might have access to? It'd be handy if they left him a certain degree of lucidity -- putting him to sleep for more than an hour or two would disrupt my plot -- otoh a certain propensity to hallucinate would also have its advantages plotwise so really I'm not overly fussy. I just want to make the pain go away.

Comments

[poetrychook.livejournal.com]

Yes, willow bark is what I was going to suggest too, although I didn't know if it tasted bitter or not. In general, alkaloids taste bitter, and alkaloids include narcotics such as opium and its derivatives, but narcotics (apart from maybe not being available in medieval Denmark) are, well *narcotic*. I.e. sleep inducing.

I think willow bark and laudanum (tincture of opium) were pretty much it for oral painkillers before modern drugs came on the scene, but I could be wrong.

There were of course poultices etc - the medieval equivalent of wheat packs.

[zeborah]

Speaking of wheat packs, Olaus Magnus recommends a fresh sheepskin. (Un)fortunately when my protag is injured his rescuers have neither a sheep handy nor the liberty to skin it if they had, so I don't have to think too much about how that was meant to work.