davywavy | Intolerances

Chatting to a friend recently, she told me something about herself which took me by surprise. This in itself is unusual, given the rogues gallery of wierdoes and refugees from the funny farm who I seem to hang out with most of the time. I've grown inured to people telling me things like "Have I mentioned that I can rotate my limbs through 360^o?", or "There was this one time, at band camp...". This wasn't something salacious or freaky, though, just surprising.
We were chatting about what we had for lunch, and I said that I make sandwishes to save money and asked if she did likewise.
"Ooh, no", she replied. "I'm gluten intolerant."
"Uh?", I replied, intelligently.
"Gluten intolerant. I can't eat bread or pasta or anything like that."
"That's odd", I said in understanding tones. "Can't you, you know, eat a little bit of bread every day and build up a tolerance over time, like with arsenic?"
"Nope", she said. "It makes my stomach start digesting itself and makes me very ill indeed. If I ate a sandwich it could put me in hospital."

I was somewhat taken aback by this. I'd heard of things like food intolerances, but in my tough Yorkshire fashion I'd always just kinda assumed that they were the result of being a bit Southern and soft and not really something to worry about. The thought that Hovis = DEATH just wasn't something which had crossed my mind.

On slow news days, the newspapers sometime worrying articles about the rise in things like asthma and food intolerances and how they just seem to be more prevalent these days. I have to wonder if they're no more common than in former times, but that we're just better at both identifying and treating them now. It’s only recently that we’ve really noticed that sometimes things like nuts and milk can be fatal and so I have to wonder just how many people died of unidentified intolerances in history. As noted in a recent post, the Victorians seems to positively expect their children to die in a picturesque way on a couch talking about angels (a recent scientific study which I’ve just made up indicates that a child dies or an unidentifiable complaint on average every forty pages in any given Victorian novel), and so one wonders whether when Little Billy was put to bed with a diet of bread and milk to strengthen him up, he was actually being seen off by his joint lactose and gluten intolerances. There’s a cruel irony in that, I think.
Further back into history people seem to have died from all kinds of weird and wonderful – and downright inexplicable to modern eyes - things. Cause of death in the UK was first reported routinely in the 1600’s, and examination of the parish records of St Giles in the Fields from a single month in that century shows that amongst the obvious things like ‘plague’ and ‘executed for treason’, two people died of an affliction called ‘planet’. I’ve no idea how someone could die of ‘planet’ short of one dropping on them, and that strikes me as unlikely at best.
Unless it was something to do with their digestive system caused by Uranus.

Heh heh heh. Uranus. Gets me every time.

However, you hopefully get my point that medical science has only really just started identifying these complaints and so saying they’re on the rise might just be due to us simply seeing things which were there all the time but not recognised.
But what do I know?
A poll:

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