People had harder lives in so many ways, but they did not commit suicide so were in some way mentally healthier.
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.
> 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.
Same. Also profoundly grateful for vaccines.
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.
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 :-)
<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.
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.
You would just die of a million other things like hunger, or spoiled food, or starvation, etc, etc
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.)
That is absolutely wild.
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.
Freak_NL•2mo ago
> 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.
omnicognate•2mo ago
softg•2mo ago
wizzwizz4•2mo ago
RankingMember•2mo ago
I'm convinced the British have a monopoly on unintentionally hilarious/ironic place names.
jjgreen•2mo ago