Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm a lique Hawthorne. Today we have the latest in our everything you want to know series

asking questions submitted by you along with some of the most popular online searches.

This week we'll be discussing the history of medicine.

Our expert is Mary Fissle, a professor in the Department of History at John Hopkins University. Putting the questions to Mary was our digital editorial assistant Rachel Dilling.

If I was an ordinary person living in the past, so if we maybe we should take 18th century Bristol as an example,

what would I do if I became unwell? How accessible was healthcare?

Like what sort of options would I have?

Well not great but not nothing either.

I think that there's sort of an informal health care system in most times and places. It may not be regulated from the top but there are series of options

Always always the first option is domestic care which is to say taking care of yourself at home or having a family

member take care of you.

Plenty of available commercial remedies in the 18th century you could go to an apothecary and pretty much ask for whatever you wanted if you could afford it.

There were patent remedies already bottled up for some things.

If you were, if you had the money or you had good connections, you could get care from a surgeon or a physician or an apothecary, sometimes physicians and surgeons would see charity patients

for free, you know, as a charitable act.

You could potentially get admitted to a hospital.

Again, it's a charity.

You have to show that you're worthwhile

and that you could be morally respectable.

What would make a person worthwhile or morally respectable, as you put it?

In employment, not a vagrant, you know, not sexually suspect. I mean the hospital originally their ideal

patient would have been a head of household and they were going to sort of

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