As a thank you to our loyal readers and community, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with ThinkGeek to give away a few fun and geeky prizes. Today is the final day of our holiday trivia challenge, so put on your thinking caps!
The way this extremely complex game works is that we’ll give you a few cool trivia tidbits to wow you with our vast knowledge of the cool but unimportant and then we’ll close with a trivia question that we do hope will stump you. You can dig deep into the recesses of your brain (or Google) and answer via the comments on the post. The best answer, according to the RWW staff, will win the prize of the day, kindly donated for your geeky pleasure from ThinkGeek.
We here at ReadWriteWeb understand that everything Retro, especially when it pertains to childhood fun, is new again. You remember your Atari fondly, despite it’s crude attempts to make one game of ball and stick, into another, simply by changing the title. You conveniently forget the fact that despite the lack of a save system, right in the middle of the 8th castle on Super Mario Bros., your little brother would barrel into your room and the vibrations would pop the cartridge up in your Nintendo. Sure, you could possibly push it back down and it might keep you right where you left off, but in the end, you made sure little brother regretted his heavy feet, didn’t you?
Forgetting the torture of early gaming, we yearn for a return of the simple games, sans the aforementioned catastrophes. Luckily, the folks at ThinkGeek feel the same way. They wanted to play those old games, but on newer hardware.
The iCade is today’s trivia prize. Yes, you’re welcome fellow geeks.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
History was my major in college, so when asked to come up with trivia, I always try to go with what I know. While I’d love to wow you with my advanced knowledge of tech, if it’s not a video game, I’m the last person on the ReadWriteWeb staff you should ask. That said, I think I can hold my own when it comes to Medieval European studies, and have a fairly extensive knowledge of useless trivia from 1500-1950 as well.
Good luck!
Comfortably Numb
There’s a great debate regarding the first use of anesthesia. Some claim its first use was by a dentist, either Horace Wells or William T.G. Morton. Others claim it was a surgeon who first administered an anesthetic, either Charles T. Jackson or Crawford Long. The 1800s was actually fraught with this debate. The story of Horace Wells, who threw acid on a prostitute while high, testing an anesthetic, and ended up taking his own life in prison, is particularly tragic. But in the end, most people agree that Sir James Young Simpson, a free thinker and incredibly bright man, seems to have made the first happy dose. Simpson, an Obstetrician, introduced anesthesia in childbirth in 1799.
Wash Your Hands!
Another medical pioneer, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, discovered that women who birthed at home were far less likely to die in childbirth than those who delivered in a hospital. Apparently, it’s quite dangerous to remove your hands from the dissection of a cadaver and then use them in the delivery of a baby without a good scrub. It seems obvious to us today that the germs on a dead body should not be applied liberally to a woman in childbirth. But, remember this was a few decades before Pastuer and Lister (and Snow and Redi) furthered the evidence of the germ theory. Unfortunately, while the incidence of death dropped from 18% to 2% after Semmelweis instituted handwashing, the time was not yet right to end the widespread deaths from Puerperal Fever (childbed fever). Rejected and mocked, Semmelweis died in an insane asylum at the ripe old age of 47.
Famous women who died of puerperal fever: Mary Wollstonecraft (one of the earliest feminists and the mother of Mary Shelley), two wives of Henry VII, Katherine Parr (the final wife) and Jane Seymour (the one who gave him a son), and his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Considering all the difficulties with royal miscarriages in the Tudor era, one might wonder about the efficacy of their physicians.
Royal childbirth did eventually improve. By the time Queen Victoria was birthing, a few hundred years later, she was able to birth in relative safety and ease due to her physician’s excellent sanitary attention and anesthetic use (the Snow mentioned above).
Your Question
An Unlikely Romance
And here’s the question that I hope will give you pause before you’re able to answer it. There once was a lady, fair of face, tiny in stature and haughty in nature. It’s rumored she was in love with an English ambassador. Alas, her bastard cousin proposed. This lady, full of affront at having to consider his offer, declined due to the unfortunate circumstance of his birth.
Her Knight cousin, full of his own affront, marched over to her and pulled her off her horse by her braids. She then accepted his proposal. She bore him 11 children and many say they were quite happy.
Students of medieval history will know that her husband was one of the most powerful conquerors ever. Who was this famous lady?
