Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 November 3

= November 3 =

Military medicine in ancient warfare?
How were injured soldiers treated in ancient times? There was no antiseptic, no antibiotic. How were woulds from spear, arrow, swords were treated? Were there MEDIVAC in ancient battlefields? What was the chance of survival of wounded soldiers? --IEditEncyclopedia (talk) 05:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Some information for the Medieval era at Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia, Volume 1 by Stanley Sandler (p. 559) and Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon by Piers D. Mitchell.
 * For the ancient world, try Man and Wound in the Ancient World: A History of Military Medicine from Sumer to the Fall of Constantinople by Richard A. Gabriel, and The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World by Guido Majno.
 * Alansplodge (talk) 11:11, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * There were ways to sterilize surgical instruments then, such as amputation saws, if they had known of the importance. Fire would work, and alcohol would, too, if they could manage to distill it to a high enough purity.  Urine is usually sterile, too.   Medical leeches could also help, if used properly, to pull stagnant, infected blood from an area and restore circulation.   Trepanning could remove pressure from the brain, but the risk of infection was a major problem.  As for chances of survival, they would be much higher of the wound was to a limb, which could then be amputated if it became infected.   StuRat (talk) 16:41, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The question was about what they did do, not what you imagine they might have done if they had known it would work. --76.71.5.45 (talk) 21:27, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The OP stated "There was no antiseptic". This wasn't technically correct, so needed clarification.  They had antiseptics, but just didn't know how to use them properly. StuRat (talk) 01:18, 5 November 2016 (UTC)


 * We also have the article battlefield medicine that has a timeline of medical procedures used in battle but it is perilously short on sources and doesn't have any mention of medicine prior to the 1400s. Sterilization wasn't really implemented until the mid-1800s, when the study microbiology really started to take off. Joseph Lister is considered the father of modern surgery for introducing it in to common use. Which is well after what the OP was looking for. uhhlive (talk) 16:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, Ignaz Semmelweis was the first doctor to bother to wash his hands between patients in 1847 - nobody else listened and they locked him up in an asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards. Alansplodge (talk) 19:08, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Although the medical profession originally scoffed at Ignaz Semmelweis's ideas on hygiene they were not the reason why he was locked up and killed. 80.44.161.39 (talk) 13:03, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

How do primary schools get a fresh batch of kids every year?
Is there ever a moment where the neighborhood population ages, with no new population growth? Do primary schools have to recruit students from other districts or just shut down? Do local governments re-distribute people to the local school districts to make sure that all the schools are filled up with a fresh supply of students, even at the cost of providing school buses that may have to travel longer distances? Do people make sure that one school is not overloaded with students at the expense of other local public schools? Finally, how do the children of undocumented immigrants attend school, or is school registration too risky for these children because they may not have a US birth certificate, passport, social security number, or valid government-issued ID? My questions are all interconnected, dealing with the logistics of student assignment to local public schools in the USA. 66.213.29.17 (talk) 15:15, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * (US) A lot of shuffling around is done within school districts and between them. Some examples:


 * 1) Age change. My high school changed from 9th grade-12th to 10th grade-12th, to distribute the 9th grade to the middle schools, to deal with overpopulation at the high school.


 * 2) Reassigning students. They can be moved to another school in the same district, or the district boundaries can be redrawn to move students from an overpopulated district to an underpopulated adjacent district.


 * 3) Changing use of schools. In my district the same building was alternately used as a high school, middle school, and elementary school, depending on the demand at the time.


 * 4) Trailers can be used for quick extra capacity on a temporary basis. I had one class in one.


 * 5) Merging districts. Merge an underpopulated district with an overpopulated one to solve both problems.


 * 6) Extended school year (this links to something about special needs students, not what I meant). This spreads the kids out over more days, so fewer are in school at any time, to get more use out of the building and staff.  For example, if you can divide the students into 4 tracks, and only 3 of the 4 are in school at any one time, you can fit 1600 students in a school with capacity for only 1200 at a time.  However, the down side is that students must go to school during summer and can be separated from their friends, if on different tracks.  One variation on this puts students in class, but outside the school building, for example in a camp, for part of the year. StuRat (talk) 15:51, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * (US) Regarding financing, schools generally get a stipend per student, so if they take on more students they get more money from the district or state to pay for them. StuRat (talk) 16:06, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * (US) As for undocumented immigrants (or their children) attending school, some more liberal areas will have a policy that info used for registering students will not be passed on to authorities, in order to encourage everyone to enroll in school. It comes down to which is considered more important, deporting illegal aliens or educating children. StuRat (talk) 16:04, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Note that the law of large numbers ensures that the number of new students each year will be approximately the same, unless some fundamental change has occurred, like if the major employer in the region has shut it's doors and people started to move away. One new potential issue is the Zika virus, which may cause people in infected areas to put off having children, reducing school age populations in a few years, and then increasing it later, if the disease is cured.  StuRat (talk) 16:09, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * In Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath he devotes a chapter to the issue of dying school districts and plummeting enrollment in Connecticut. I recommend reading it for a pretty good analysis of it; but yes, there are towns where aging population coupled with fleeing industry leads to lower enrollment in elementary schools, to the point where the schools drop below a threshold that is sustainable.  In other districts, there is massive growth.  the Wake County Public School System, where I live for example, adds about 1000 new students every year; that means that if they had 150,000 total students this year, there would be 151,000 students next year, and so on.  That kind of growth necessitates a new elementary school almost every year.  In other districts with stable populations, you'd have roughly the same number of students graduating as coming in to first grade, and the entire system stays in equilibrium.  And yes, the situation is VERY complex, as you note.  Immigration, mobility, fecundity, etc. all play a role.  -- Jayron 32 16:11, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Add state funding to the mix as well. In PA there are fights over funding because with a proposed new formula, dying school districts will lose money. Right now some districts have huge surpluses of money and offer great services to students since there's lots more money to go around. School districts can also merge to combat shrinking numbers and also utilize online schooling. 🔯 Sir Joseph 🍸 (talk) 16:20, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Rogiet is a small village in South Wales, with a new school. From the 1960s though, the village kept its old school, in an increasingly outdated building. The reason was an unusual connection between the local railway engine shed, desirable tied housing for railway workers and the withdrawal of steam trains in the UK. Railwaymen who retired could keep their houses, those who changed jobs would have to move. When the steam shed closed, those who changed job to the expanding steelworks nearby tended to move to the adjoining villages and those who stayed behind were increasingly of retirement age. There were thus few children in the village, even though the population was otherwise growing slowly. This demographic blip took decades to work through.  Only when new housing started to develop, doubling the size of the village, did it become apparent that a new school was needed. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:51, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * To bring up another country, Japan is having huge problems with rural areas emptying as the country's population declines, leading, among other things, to schools closing because there aren't enough kids in the area to justify keeping them open. Here's a Guardian article on the topic. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 09:51, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Related, see Wink-Loving Independent School District, plus search for "pupils" at Mentone,_Texas. Nyttend (talk) 14:36, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Voting age for 1975 UK Referendum
I've had a look at our article but can't find any mention. At what age were people entitled to vote in the 1975 Referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU?--TammyMoet (talk) 19:00, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * From our article: Timeline_of_young_people%27s_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom, I can see this:
 * ''1970 United Kingdom
 * ''Having concluded that the historical causes for fixing 21 years as the age of majority were no longer relevant to contemporary society, the Latey Committee's recommendation was accepted, that the Age of majority, includingvoting age, should be reduced to 18 years.
 * So I must assume that in 1975, the voting age was 18 for all types of votes. --Lgriot (talk) 19:51, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The UK age of majority, and therefore also the age at which you could vote, was reduced from 21 to 18 on January 1st 1970. That was therefore the date on which I came of age - being then between 18 and 21. Wymspen (talk) 20:01, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I remember that I was too young to vote in 1975, being 16 years old. Can't find a reference online, but that probably confirms that no special arrangements were made. Alansplodge (talk) 22:02, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks all, I remember (like Alansplodge) being just too young to vote but couldn't remember by how much! --TammyMoet (talk) 11:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)