Dumb Ways to Die: Printed Ephemera | Hacker News Reader

Dumb Ways to Die: Printed Ephemera

ilovetypography.com

46 pointsjjgreen39 comments

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.

> 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.

Same. Also profoundly grateful for vaccines.

It should be added that in the 17th century, only 8% of the population (Europe) lived in cities. Germany today has a larger population today than the whole Europe during 17th century. London during the 17th century is kind of the worst case scenario with high population density and a port city with high amount people traveling in and out, but limited access to medicine and hygiene.

True; in fact mortality in 17th-century London was so bad that it required a net flow of migrants just to keep the population stable. Most of all, you were at much higher risk of plague during the plague epidemics.

But rural Europe was no picnic either - you would still be likely to die in all sorts of painful ways, from sepsis, diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc. And my god, it would have been dull.

Honestly, if you forced me to go back to the 17th century, I would probably take the risk and live in London. At least there is the possibility of crossing paths with Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, the early Royal Society etc. while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet.

> while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet

A PhD student once mentioned to me that when people envisage themselves in history, they always assume they'd be upper class. No one ever thinks that they'll be poor :-)

It's like when people do past life hypnosis, everyone is a King or a Warrior or an Aristocrat

(Clairvoyant) Ah yes I am seeing your past life, you were an utterly unremarkable person, doing the same things people around you did, saying the same things people around you said, neither especially kind or cruel, but making sure that you stayed alive as much as you could help it.

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is among the books that discusses this.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms>

Cities simply could not grow without net in-migration until the development of sewerage, municipal waste removal, fresh-water systems, and public health in general.

Another favourite illustration, "The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City", showing the overall decline in mortality from 1800 to present:

<https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uTWEATUzgxk/TXQoTibILtI/AAAAAAAAA...>

From: <https://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/conqu...>

Note that for all the vaunted advances of 20th century medicine, the needle hardly moved at all from 1920 through 1990, and mortality increased from 1950 -- 1970. There has been substantial improvement from 1990 through 2000.

>> Also profoundly grateful for vaccines.

Yup

Sadly, I've seen many online arguments resembling "humanity survived millennia without vaccines, why do we need them now?", obviously entirely ignorant of the consistently extremely high childhood death rates, where a couple was very lucky to not have to mourn half of their children. As the article pointed out,

>> "In early modern Europe, almost 50% of children did not live beyond age 15. Around a quarter of infants died before their first birthday."

All one needs to do, at least in New England where I live, is visit an old graveyard and notice that among the pre-1900 markers, the vast majority of gravestones tell of a very short lifespan, many only mere months.

Those same anti-science dolts would be screaming for someone to do something if their children died at such appalling rates, but with willful ignorance declare they know better than literal armies and generations of scientists, medical researchers, and epidemiologists.

As Carl Sagan pointed out, they think their ignorance is better than the scientists' hard-won knowledge.

This anti-science ignorance is a serious issue for any society, and the tension between deliberate ignorance and hard-won science being put on equal footing.

Go back further and the tooth problems weren't really prevalent. Gotta get back before grain cultivation though.

Shat are you basing that on? I searched around online but found the opposite, e.g. https://archive.ph/yws2m

Probably from the preserved skulls of those lucky enough to get preserved. So, you know, good ol survivorship bias.

It’s popular to believe that there is some semi-idealistic past, or at least some better past, that contradicts any notion of progress. This is supported by lack of evidence once you go far enough back, you can kind of make your own narrative unless you stick to what little evidence is available.

Yeah. Since the comment mentioned grains specifically, I wondered if it was coming from a "paleo" diet perspective.

Its from the perspective of the things that cause tooth decay and their relatively recent addition to human diets.

Processed/refined sugar for sure. But our ancestors in many parts of the world would have had plenty of access to fructose and other natural sugars, which can certainly cause tooth decay.

True

You would just die of a million other things like hunger, or spoiled food, or starvation, etc, etc

> I've had at least one infection that would probably have killed me in the 17th century.

I had a run of 5 years where every summer I'd get bitten by something and it'd get infected requiring antibiotics. Had to do one interview with a right hand that was easily 50% larger than usual, bright red, and emitting a terrifying amount of heat. Luckily it didn't involve any typing...

(Although in olden times I wouldn't have had those infections because I would undoubtedly have died in childhood - fell down the stairs onto my head as a baby, got stabbed through the hand with a pencil at school, allergic reaction to bullrushes, had a thumb sliced open with a rusty stanley knife also at school, cut my knee and elbow open by landing on a milk bottle on holiday, concussed myself jumping a ramp on a bike, cheese-grated myself on the road going over the handlebars when my chain locked, got bitten countless times by cats both pet and feral, had measles, chicken pox, rubella, plus a variety of other illnesses and scrapes etc. all before my teens.)

It's amazing the technology that we have available, often cheaply. I'd had some suspected infection in my leg one time, where it looked pinker (sunburned?) compared to the other, and I thought it felt warmer. I happen to have a cheap thermal camera, so took some false-color images compared to the other leg, showing that it was indeed warmer. It was great fun to show the doctors, who had to ask, "what exactly am I looking at?" Antibiotics took care of it, whatever was going on.

It lists "Dead in the streets" in the "List of notorious diseases". What a time it must have been to be alive :D

also "Suddenly" / "Sodainly"

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

That makes it seem like we're all in someone else's "dwarf fortress" game :)

ai-christianson needs alcohol to get through the working day

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.

Read the rest of the page. These are diseases the author deems "notorious". Taking grief and hanged themselves together that makes around 500 out of 229250 deaths. Which is very low. Globally around 1% of deaths are suicides, which is more than 4 times higher.

It was even lower going further back.

People had harder lives in so many ways, but they did not commit suicide so were in some way mentally healthier.

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.

Horrific, I imagine. Brewer's mash is usually a little below 70°C. If someone fell in they probably survived with extensive scalding and died later from infection.

If the main purpose of this was to satisfy people's morbid curiosity that makes a lot of sense. Maybe they made up some juicy deaths in slow news weeks even.

I imagine "suddenly" would be things like a heart attack – if you're not taking measurements as the patient is dying, you don't know enough to deduce it from symptoms, and don't perform an autopsy, it's hard to tell what happened.

> St. Giles Cripplegate

I'm convinced the British have a monopoly on unintentionally hilarious/ironic place names.

Nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartown,_Huddersfield

> 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.

It is one of the most striking things that makes life in the premodern past so unimaginably different from today. To be a parent was to suffer continuous tragedy. An example: Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714). She was pregnant 18 times, and not one of her pregnancies resulted in an adult child to inherit her throne. Miscarriages, stillbirths, and five children born alive. Four died in infancy from various causes. One, Prince William Duke of Gloucester, lived to age 11, when he died of an infectious disease - probably smallpox. His death was one of the key events that led to the House of Hannover (the current British royal family) inheriting the throne in 1714.

Smallpox probably killed about a billion people, many of them children, before its eradication in the 1970s due to a global vaccination campaign. You can see it is listed in the Bills of Mortality in TFA, always with a high number of deaths.

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

It’s already been (at least partly) digitized, e.g. https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/

One thing you will have trouble with however, is that disease categories and the process of determining cause of death changed a great deal from 1527 to 1858. So the categories you're working with aren't stable at all.

Wow, thanks!

Uh oh, "Griping in the Guts" is listed; HN beware!

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