First, picture this: by his late 40s, Henry wasn’t the athletic, jousting hunk of his youth. He was massive—maybe over 400 pounds at one point. His legs were a disaster: open, festering ulcers that stank so bad people complained. Imagine the medical knowledge of the 1540s trying to handle that. Gross, right?
Doctors back then blamed “bad humours” and gave him weird herbal baths. But modern sleuths have a better idea: he probably had a combo platter of lifestyle diseases.
Was It the Famous Leg Wound?
Henry took a nasty jousting accident in 1536 that never really healed. It’s not just a cool story—it’s key. That injury likely led to chronic bone infections, maybe osteomyelitis. His leg eventually became so ulcerated that it oozed pus and had to be lanced regularly. Ouch. Just thinking about it makes me wince.
But wait—could a leg wound really kill a king? In a world without antibiotics, absolutely. That infection might’ve spread to his blood, causing sepsis. Sepsis is a silent monster, and it would explain his sudden decline in early 1547.
