by libraryofbabel
5 subcomments
- I went to grad school for history, and it completely cured me of any nostalgia for or desire to live in the premodern past. The past is an interesting place, but also a place of unmitigated horrors. If you were lucky enough to live into old age in relatively good health, you would have seen many friends die young, and half of your children as well. Just the number of deaths from "teeth" in the Bills of Mortality says it all. These would have been extremely painful worsening tooth infections eventually resulting in sepsis or a brain infection, and death:
> In seventeenth-century London — and for that matter most other places — teeth were a leading cause of death, owing to poor oral hygiene and no effective means to treat infections at a time when extractions — without anesthesia — were performed by the local barber.
I've had at least one infection that would probably have killed me in the 17th century. I am grateful for the existence of antibiotics.
- Some of these causes of death (“dead in the streets”, “scalded in a brewer’s mash”) remind me of The Gashlycrumb Tinies [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies
by s1mplicissimus
1 subcomments
- It lists "Dead in the streets" in the "List of notorious diseases". What a time it must have been to be alive :D
- The stats from enclosed page are quite interesting. People speak today about depression/suicide epidemic, but when you look at that old numbers, "grief" and "hanged themselves" together give a top percentage.
- Cause of Death:
> Scalded in a Brewer's Maſh, at St. Giles Cripplegate, 01.
That's… quite specific.
And then there is the joker who entered 'suddenly' as the cause of death.
- > In early modern Europe, almost 50% of children did not live beyond age 15. Around a quarter of infants died before their first birthday.
That is absolutely wild.
- Would be really cool to graph out causes of death over the centuries! Wikipedia cites continous publication from 1527 to 1858[1]. Collecting the data seems daunting, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality
- Uh oh, "Griping in the Guts" is listed; HN beware!
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