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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

This is something that struck me when reading Dickens; people died, a lot. One thing it highlights to me is the importance of modern medicine and antibiotics. Another thing is how different the human experience is now for most of the world; children and death are much less common (for most) than previous centuries. Sure this is common knowledge, but taken for granted I believe.

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I remember being struck by the fact that most people had teeth go bad and basically rot in place. If you lived near someone with skills they'd grab it with tongs and rip it out, no anesthesia. And this was probably an almost universal experience (for those that lived long enough)

There are some YouTube videos and mini-documentaries of Indian street dentists who have been working for generations. It’s probably as close as we can get to viewing the 1800s or earlier practices.

I don't know that I can find any sources to cite but I once wrote some code for an anthropologist analyzing prehistoric tooth scans, and he mentioned that modern dental carries are substantially more common now than they were in the past because acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars that weren't used in modern quantities until fairly recent history.

>acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars

The way my dentist put it, and it's stuck with me, is: Tooth decay is caused by the bacteria in your mouth eating sugar and peeing acid.

Pardon the seemingly naive idea. How much life is worse when you're shielded from harsh.

I wonder if people weren't more mentally stronger due to the fact that they knew how fragile and dangerous things were. You have to overcome fear and sublimate your existence.

Nowadays I (maybe many others) feel like always wondering if I should dive in the pool.

And the recent VR era is not helping, someone on IRC was complaining that he couldn't be in VR 24/7 so he could just live in it try anything without ever fearing death.

Friend of mine is a nurse who at one time worked in a pediatric cardiac ward. She said babies dying was horrible of course. But watching a teenage former patient die was worse.

Groups countries going through hard times tend to have higher suicide rates, substance abuse, crime rates, violence rates and what not including mental health problems.

So likely not.

Thanks for your answer.

How much is life better when you don't have to burry half of your kids?

You don't get mentally though for that, you just get jaded and even more fearful.

This reminds me of this passing from thhgtth:

"Some may be extremely rich, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, because nobody is really poor – at least nobody worth speaking of."

> people died, a lot

As always, as many people die, as are born :).

We got better at hiding the fact - by letting people die in hospitals, in homes for elderly (western world) just so it's out of sight and we are less reminded of death. On average, people live longer, yet it's not that they die "less".

One can only lose two parents, but one can lose a lot of children!

If we have a stable population, then a higher child mortality means a higher absolute death rate. If the population is growing, the situation is even more pronounced!

Indeed. The 20th century saw a lot of populations adopt anti-mortality programs before contraception. The population quadrupled in a century. Far more people were born than died!

A hundred years ago, 98% of all people were dead. Today it's only 93%. With some effort, we should be able to reduce that further.

How low can it go?

Asymptotically close to 0

> On average, people live longer, yet it's not that they die "less".

Yes, they do. Previous generations had more children. The higher birth rate did not yield a higher population growth rate, in part because the death rate was also higher. If we had death rates approaching the past, without a similar increase in birth rate, we would be in steep population decline, not the low population growth or slight population decline that most developed countries find themselves in today.

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