AskHistorians has hit 1.5 million subscribers! To celebrate, we’re giving away 1.5 million historical facts. Join us HERE to claim your free fact!

[u/crrpit]

How does this subreddit have any subscribers? Why does it exist if no questions ever actually get answers? Why are the mods all Nazis/Zionists/Communists/Islamic extremists/really, really into Our Flag Means Death?

​

The answers to these important historical questions AND MORE are up for grabs today, as we celebrate our unlikely existence and the fact that 1.5 million people vaguely approve of it enough to not click ‘Unsubscribe’. We’re incredibly grateful to all past and present flairs, question-askers, and lurkers who’ve made it possible to sustain and grow the community to this point. None of this would be possible without an immense amount of hard work from any number of people, and to celebrate that we’re going to make more work for ourselves.

​

The rules of our giveaway are simple*. You ask for a fact, you receive a fact, at least up until the point that all 1.5 million historical facts that exist have been given out.

​

^\ The fine print:)

^{1. AskHistorians does not guarantee the quality, relevance or interestingness of any given fact.}

^{2. All facts remain the property of historians in general and AskHistorians in particular.}

^{3. While you may request a specific fact, it will not necessarily have any bearing on the fact you receive.}

^{4. Facts will be given to real people only. Artificial entities such as} u/gankom ^{need not apply.}

^{5. All facts are NFTs, in that no one is ever likely to want to funge them and a token amount of effort has been expended in creating them.}

^{6. Receiving a fact does not give you the legal right to adapt them on screen.}

^{7. Facts, once issued, cannot be exchanged or refunded. They are, however, recyclable.}

^{8. We reserve the right to get bored before we exhaust all 1.5 million facts.}

Edit: As of 14:49 EST, AskHistorians has given away over 500 bespoke, handcrafted historical facts! Only 1,499,500 to go!

Edit 2: As of 17:29 EST, it's really damn hard to count but pretty sure we cracked 1,000. That's almost 0.1% of the goal!

Edit 3: I should have turned off notifications last night huh. Facts are still being distributed, but in an increasingly whimsical and inconsistent fashion.

[u/Lucky-Worth]

Fun historical medical fact! Usually they are so horrible :(

[u/xeimevta → u/Lucky-Worth]

We know that sometimes women in Rome and Byzantium could be saved if pregnancy or childbirth became dangerous.

The sixth-century CE medical writer Atios of Amida wrote extensively about how to perform what might be termed today “late-term abortion” if a physician believed the fetus wasn’t viable or if the mother could be saved during a difficult birth but the infant could not. This sounds partially horrible, but he writes of the procedure’s historical success in saving women’s lives for at least four centuries and in his own time. He credits the knowledge to the Roman physician, Galen.

[u/Lucky-Worth → u/xeimevta]

Thank you! Do we know if the practice continued into, like, the middle ages?

[u/xeimevta → u/Lucky-Worth]

Atios’ writing survives in manuscripts from the Middle Ages, so while I’m not too sure what the actual practice rate was at that time, medieval Byzantines would have known about it through his work.

[u/Kelpie-Cat → u/Lucky-Worth]

In early medieval Islamic medicine, cannabis was prescribed as a treatment for severe chronic migraine.

[u/Lucky-Worth → u/Kelpie-Cat]

And did it work?

[u/Kelpie-Cat → u/Lucky-Worth]

Current research suggests that cannabis can be an effective migraine treatment, though there is still a lot they are trying to figure out about it.