> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
You see this basically throughout history except in very bad times like famine or major plagues, or were there is persistent dietary issues as we introduced in the late 19thc, or early on in the switch to farming. Rural areas also tend to do better than urban.
Antiseptics, as well, were huge in saving people from from otherwise deadly nicks.
Measles is fairly low mortality in absolute terms. Even within living memory, getting the measles and the mumps was a normal childhood experience. The overall mortality is 1 or 2 per thousand and the disease is most dangerous in under 5s and over 20s. So before widespread vaccination, everyone was exposed before their 20s and we excluded under 5s from the count.
Edit: I realize 5 is the cutoff for this study because measles and the like. It is deadly to youth in pretty stark contrast to older.
“Deadly” can be true for measles in young children but again, it’s important to be clear that the actual mortality is very low. It certainly contributed (with many other diseases) to lowering life expectancy for infants, but it was not even close to a death sentence; the vast majority survived. As I said, it was basically a rite of passage even for our grandparent’s generation.
There's a reason humans survived to modern day.
well we made a bunch of kids to offset deaths.
I mean, sure, getting chicken pox was relatively common when I was a kid, and few people died of it. But a low percentage of all the population is still a large number of people.
I would say that infections from battle wounds are probably more likely, but that probably has more to do with the surface area and size of the wound and health leading up to the battle. A big scratch from a briar or a chicken might bleed a lot, but the wound will be closed fairly quickly. A big scratch from a sword is going to take a lot longer to close, and you might have been near-starving and short on sleep for weeks beforehand and have been crammed in tight conditions with 10k other guys.
That said, it's still greatly exaggerated to say a war-wound is guaranteed death. People got hurt in battle a lot and generally made it out OK. You can find lots of famous examples where even to me it's quite shocking they were able to survive at all without modern medical care. For example, not only was the hard-partying Alexander the Great wounded about a jillion times in battle, one of his last battles involved a punctured lung. It probably eventually contributed to his death sometime later, but it's surprising to me he even lasted the night!
Consider, 50 to 70 million deaths in WW2. And that isn't looking at more genocidal like methods earlier humanity almost certainly used. Numbers would be lower, but percentage higher.
Yes, we are resilient, but that has limits. And is mostly overcome by having more kids.
The data suggests your feelings are incorrect, and that things were not as dangerous as you feel they are. I'm not even sure what you mean in this case at all: people still washed their clothes, garden tools are not any more sterile now than they were then, and refrigeration can be worked around by different dietary and food storage choices. (Ironically the need for refrigeration partially came with societal advancement: fresh milk for example was traveling farther and farther and increasingly transactional circumstances, which meant it was more likely to carry food-borne diseases whereas, when you go further back, nobody was waiting days to drink their fresh milk and thus didn't worry about it.)
I’ve no doubt that there was a statistical impact, but it is probably rendered invisible by such things as skyrocketing obesity, heart disease, and cancer rates caused by the modern environment and lifestyle. This is probably especially true when you consider the QoL of many older people today. This is also apparent when the cited article mentions that many fewer people died of heart disease, but they did die of heart damage caused by infections. They lived just as long, you might think antibiotics would keep us going even longer, but we tread water because now we simply die of heart disease at about the same age or a little younger instead.
Most of the feels is from personal experience with almost losing kids and spouse to infections. In the modern world. :) They 90% would be dead in the past.
Similar experience with grand parents. Though, they did pass somewhat early.
I get what you're saying, but Measles is definitely the wrong thing to put here. Most people over the age of 35 aren't going to get what you're saying.