Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire (2019)

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82 pointsdiodorus28 comments

I really wish we had more popular representations of the later empire. So many people believe that today’s world where people visit and settle from all around is something completely new and perhaps bad. Perhaps if they knew what the Roman empire stretching from London to Palmyra looked like, it might amend their perspective.

(And for anyone who’d jump on this: No, it wasn’t this mixing of peoples that brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)

But it was a contributory factor, probably the most ubiquitous in the fall of most empires.

Full: https://delong.typepad.com/rome.pdf

Ancient Romans had a ritual of visiting the baths daily. Doing so helped them reduce the spread of diseases. I remember learning in highschool latin class that Greek medicine focused on curing diseases while Roman medicine focused on avoiding diseases. If you were able to go back to Roman times you would find that people were realitively clean and well fed, even the plebian class.

Any long lasting civilisation had people that were relatively clean and well fed - that's a very fundamental requirement for the civilisation to last long, after all!

You will find that even older civilisations, such as Egyptians, ancient Indians, Mesopotamians, etc. all had a relatively good nutrition.

Cleanliness here is extremely relative, though, as modern standards of cleanliness were revolutionised by fresh water supply and sewage systems. If any modern person visited an ancient city, they would have some trouble dealing with the stench.

The Romans are famous for their plumbing...

It's hard to tell how ubiquitous using a sewer for waste disposal rather than simply throwing it outside was, since a lot of accounts come from those with a vested interested in making Rome look good/bad. However, there were laws ordering compensation of those who the throwing of waste injured, so it was unlikely to be as sanitary as a modern city.

I an supprised that there could be much controversy over Roman sewers. There are preserved Roman streets across Europe and the sewers still exist today for us to inspect. The physical evidence is there in hundreds of sites. Of course their standards of cleanliness were different than ours. They had a system of collecting urine from each home so laundry services could wash clothes in pee! (It was a good source of ammonia.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome

Tangentially I was blown away to read that the age of the court officials during the Ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period could allegedly go as high as in the 70s which is pretty crazy for ~200AD

But supposedly disease was well contained in at court by the sparsity of people for the given area because everything was so vast.

Pretty crazy is how modern scholars don't see a difference between average lifespan at birth and at some age. Humans were always living up to 100, conditional on survival until some age.

Moreover, to become court official, one had to reach some wisdom first, hence the age

“Some age” doing a lot of work here. Yeomen in 14th Century England who made it to 20 years old still had a life expectancy of just 48-52 (depending on when in the century).

Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living-in-...

P.187

Doesn't that mean that for each one that dies at 30, there may well be another that dies at 70?

Life expectancy is mean not median, and the median wouldn’t work like that either.

Of course, some people loved to 70, I think there would be virtually no circumstances where that would be expected (ignoring ad absurdum takes like “age 69 and 364 days”)

What was the life expectancy once you reached the age of 30 in 200AD China?

The paper seems to me to suggests that the Romans got sicker due to increased exposure to virus and disease as they got more integrated, wealthy and populous. Perhaps this was a hidden trend behind the fall of pre-industrial age civilizations. "Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration of their health"

Romans used lead to manufacture many everyday items, including plumbing related infrastructure, resulting in exposure to lead contamination.

Lead reduces your cognitive performance and makes you aggressive.

A post of the full article would be nice

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