school principal injuries are a reasonably big deal at the moment . Between the lawsuits brought by ex - playersagainst the NFLand the piles of enquiry let out thelong - term consequencesof concussion , it ’s hard to ignore the dangers inherent in contact sport . We know now that repeated traumatic brain injury ( TBI ) can lead to aggression , climate swings , depression , headaches , and amnesia — conditions that just befall to have plagued Henry VIII . A team of neurologists outline the evidence in a forthcoming paper in the journalClinical Neuroscience . Mental_flossreceived a written matter of the paper in progression of its publication .
From all accounts , as a young man , Henry was a passably happy clotheshorse , and a delight to be around . By 1536 , he was emphatically … not . The King Henry VIII we opine of today was a bloodthirsty despot , tearaway , unpredictable , and homicidal — the kind of man who would send two of his six wives to the public executioner . So what happened ?
This is n’t the first time researchers have proposed a medical account for the king ’s dramatic shift . Cushing syndrome , syphilis , hypothyroidism , diabetes , andMcLeod syndromewith sterility and psychosis have all been evoke as the cause .
But a triplet of behavioural neurologists from the Yale School of Medicine have a different diagnosing . They read every diary article they could determine on Henry , several life , and the king ’s owncollected letters and papers . ( One of the great things about researching royal line is that we have a record of passably much everything they ’ve ever said , done , or eaten . )
historian generally consort that Henry sustained at least three serious blow to the point . In 1524 , the lance of Henry ’s jousting opponent pierced the king ’s peak and splintered against his face . The tycoon devolve off his horse , recovered , got back on , and went back to jousting . Just one yr later , while out hunting , the king decided he would pole - bank vault over a hedge , like you do . But the rod intermit , and Henry fall into a ditch full of water . He was too out of it to resist , and had to be trail out by his feet . But the most spartan blow came in 1536 , during another jousting friction match . Henry was dismount . He fell to the ground , and his Equus caballus fell on top of him . The king was out cold for two hours .
That same twelvemonth , Henry ’s reign of terror start up . His irregular , incomprehensible explosions made him the terror of his own court , for he was just as likely to order the capital punishment of a champion as he was a foe . His behaviour was erratic and violent , and he often flew into rages for reasons that were unreadable to those around him . He became impulsive — and if you demand more grounds of that , just look at his six marriages and two complete queens .
Henry start suffering bouts of freakish amnesia , which led to severe contradictions in his commands . As the city of Boulogne was under military blockade , Henry reportedly demanded on paper that the city be protect , while tell aloud he wanted it to be demolish . In 1546 , the king assure his 6th wife Catherine Parr that he would protect her , forgetting that the day before he had ordered his guards to take her to the Tower of London .
The top executive was also subject to migraine worry and deep depressions , as well as a number of seeming endocrinological problem that could have been touch off by TBI . His rages , his erratic behavior , even his powerlessness later in life — there may be a unsubdivided explanation for it all , lead author Arash Salardinisaid in a press firing : “ It is challenging to remember that forward-looking European history may have changed constantly because of a blow to the head . ”
