Authormoheinous: A number of times in the book the narrarator described using dirt or shit applied to their arrows and swords to cause wounds to become infected. Yet the Germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the 1800's. At the very earliest it may have been inferred during the black plague of the 1400's. Medieval medicine actually involved applying mud to wounds to speed healing. So is there some historical basis for the tactic or just some enjoyable literary liberty being taken by Bill?
warrenellis: I think anyone half-awake will assume that smearing shit in an open wound isn't going to be good for the woundee. It is actually recorded that blades would be wiped in shit before big battles -- the first instance I remember being told of was the Siege of Berkeley Castle, 1645-ish. So the germ theory may not have been understood until whenever, but it's my understanding that soldiers believed there was a link between them wiping their blades in the latrines, and sticking their arrows in the ground, and people getting sick from those adulterated wounds... Hold on, hold on -- why did the Tartars catapult plague-infected corpses into Kaffa, back in the 1300s, if they didn't have a grasp of the idea? I mean, I know that as late as the 1800s people were still saying "all smell is disease," but there was certainly an understood correlation between shit and sickness. I also seem to recall some bastard, maybe Lithuanian, using trebuchets to fire heaps of shit and corpses into a city, around 1430..."
"orwellseyes: The Muslims used plague dead on besieged cities as early as the conquest of Egypt, 642 AD or so. The mongol sack of baghdad, 1260, Hulagu Khan flung corpses into the city ahead of his army to bring pestilence and drive people out into the Horde's waiting armies. Word of that, and it's effectiveness, surely spread.
Sanitation was pretty well understood, remember the Romans built entire architectures for the purposes of moving waste and water around. People might not have had standards of cleanliness, but they knew a bit. Packing wounds with linen and herbs was common practice since before Christianity rose in Europe."
I would submit, too, that what the Mongols did was hardly something obscure nobody noticed.