How did we survive the olden days?

[AnneLovesGilbert]

I watched a film last night, it wasn’t amazing but it got me thinking again about how so many people survived how awful life must have been so we’d end up here. A woman was giving birth on a muddy floor in a grim looking freezing cold castle. My mum wouldn’t have made it, so I wouldn’t be here and none of my younger siblings would exist. If I miraculously had I wouldn’t have survived several childhood illnesses, never mind appendicitis and the other things modern medicine has saved me from.

The film was about Mary queen of Scots so set in the mid 16th century and maternal and infant mortality was incredibly high but it wasn’t just that. Those women will have survived so many things to even get old enough to get pregnant. And how many men died in the endless sodding wars.

Baffles me.

It wasn’t uncommon or unexpected to lose children I meant!

@AnneLovesGilbert

Interesting thoughts. I suppose suffering is relative.

The other thing that occurred to me was given how difficult the day to day must have been - even if it didn’t seem so - staggering numbers of people died for their religion. I don’t have one but on the pyramid of needs food, shelter, safety and life would seem more important.

I've thought about the religion thing too. All the thousands of people who were tortured and killed due to religious persecution, like the Spanish Inquisition- apparently all they had to do was recant and they could have walked free. I would have done that in a heartbeat. And the average age of death being about 40 years old- 70 years was know as the lifespan since biblical days, but high infant mortality made the average much lower. I think Charles Dickens or somebody has 6 children die as infants one after another. Two hundred years ago just about any disease could see you off.

[quote onlychildhamster]@MidnightMeltdown Ironically Britain's success as a nation peaked during the Industrial Revolution- mass produced goods meant that the standard of living increased. It also helped that it colonized half the world!

Countries like China failed to modernize; thats why its playing catch up. But it would take a long time before the per capita income is anyway close to the UK. Though i expect the per capita income of tier 1 cities like Beijing/Shanghai will overtake that of Manchester, if it hasn't already.[/quote]
Britain was at its peak just prior to the First World War. And its success was largely due to financial and commercial innovations as much to as it was to Abraham Darby, Stephenson and Brunel. But it was also down to the fact that we drank tea. That way the water had to be boiled which meant people could exist in large numbers to form a "workforce" within a factory system without succumbing to desease as had been the case before and as in other countries.

@Kanaloa

I an old book recently where a husband referred to his wife as the mother of his ‘six living children and three dead.’ Just matter of factly not as a ‘how tragic is this’ thing. Nowadays to lose three little children (or even one) would be a horrific tragedy but back then it was a fact of life.

Look at 'Anne of Green Gables' - the neighbour talks casually of having 'Buried two children', yet still recommends beating Anne! She's not even meant to be a cold nasty person. I can't imagine a bereaved mother today judging other parents for not being strict enough! But back then child mortality was so normal it just didn't have the same impact. It was just expected, with the hope one or 2 at least would make it through to adulthood. Like tadpoles, or bunnies.

It must have been horrible. And so normalised as to even include it in children’s novels too because it was just part of life. I couldn’t have coped.

It's amazing what small differences have impacted on us as a society.

How many lives did John Snow save by breaking the handle on a water pump?

How many lives were saved by women's skirts being shorter in the 1920s?

My maternal dgm had a child die age 3 in the 1920’s and then in 1936 she had a stillborn and the midwife yelled at her for not calling her out sooner. Never mind my gf was an alcoholic, violent man.
My dm was the youngest and was still expected to fetch coal from the coal yard in a wheelbarrow and take my dgf his lunch to the factory during her school dinner time.

On the other hand my df was one of two and thoroughly spoilt, went to the cinema every week, thought WW2 was really exciting as a 9 year old in 1939. His parents were working class but he had a good dad who worked nights in a factory and on a Monday morning came off shift and did the weekly wash for my dgm.

Strangely it was my df’s parents who died aged 48 and 52 and my maternal dgm who had the toughest life died aged 84.

Not quite the same, but everytime my elderly mum complains about how cold her house is I ask her how my grandparents managed without central heating or double glazing, she never answers me.

I don’t blame her.

@borntobequiet

Not quite the same, but everytime my elderly mum complains about how cold her house is I ask her how my grandparents managed without central heating or double glazing, she never answers me.

I don’t blame her.

Imagine anyone else did this.

My daughter tells me she has diarrhoea and I ask what she thinks her great great grandparents did when they had diarrhoea.

My son broke his leg and wants painkillers in hospital. What does he think they did in the 1600s?

@Imtoooldforallthis

Not quite the same, but everytime my elderly mum complains about how cold her house is I ask her how my grandparents managed without central heating or double glazing, she never answers me.

Fires! Many houses had open fireplaces in every room including bedrooms.

I mean I don’t exactly yearn for the days before double glazing and central heating. They were invented for a reason.

I am loving how many of you can give testimonials of your older generation, Grandparents, Gt Grandparents etc. I know very little about mine. I would love to find out more. I can't ask my Dad about his as we don't speak and it would be a bit odd to ask my Mum now.

I do know that my maternal grandmother was one of 7. They all died in 'backwards' order, the youngest first, aged late fifties, of AIDS (he was gay, and the only one in the family AFAIK, apart from me.

I wish he was still here. Had he contracted HIV nowadays obviously, he would be.

Oldest died just a couple of years ago, aged 99! Her husband had died in his fifties of a disease likely much better treatable now, and she never had another relationship 'I'm Donnie's' (not his real name). :( she'd also had 8 children.

[quote BleuJay]Please watch this. The courage of the people during that time who continued with their lives each day not knowing if it may be their last or whether their family and friends will survive.

I think they would all be saddened at how we are today.

[/quote] My parents lived through WW2 in England, and I was born when we still had to use ration cards. Throughout my childhood I heard about the war - the fear of the air raids, bombings, watching London burning at night, the all clear sirens, going without, watching the RAF and the USAF going out every day and night.

My dad was a very patriotic Englishman and only died a few years ago. A few years before he died he told me, "all those men died for nothing".

@BruceBogtrottersWife. Ask your dm. My parents have been separated for years but happily tell me about their in laws.
Don’t leave it too late.

@MidnightMeltdown

I think this is partly why Britain was so successful historically. It was bloody cold and people had to be hardy, tough, and innovative to survive.

While I enjoy modern luxuries as much as everyone else, I don't think that it's good for us as a species. We've become too soft.

If the power grids were wiped out by a solar storm, most of us would probably die.

There are a lot of cold countries!

We might have physical comforts now (or at least some of us), but we also have psychological stresses previous generations didn't imagine, 24/7 news, social media pressure etc.

Yes, there would be horrible consequences of a sudden loss of power. Previous generations would have had horrible consequences of a sudden loss of fuel or horses or whatever. So what?

Fires! Many houses had open fireplaces in every room including bedrooms.

And they were a godawful lot of work! I remember being ill enough as a child (pneumonia) to have a fire in my bedroom. My mother was delighted to rip out the open fires and fireplaces in the 60s. People are condemned for it now, but there was good reason.
My grandmother died of a placenta praevia delivering twins in the 1920s. Of course there was no way of knowing about it beforehand and no way of getting her to a hospital (rural area), even if a hospital could have done anything. It’s a thought so painful that I generally avoid thinking about it.

The thing is you don't miss what you never had. Life was different back then but they would have made the best of it. The future generations will be saying 2022 was a shit time to be alive but a number of us don't feel that way . The COVID pandemic will be in the history books. I don't think there has been a time we have been ordered to stay at home under lockdowns.

Many did die, but there was community based medicine, mostly wise women who were experienced ley midwives.
Many of them murdered as witches.
My granfmother was a ley midwife. Before the days of the NHS many people couldnt afford doctors, she delivered dozens of babies- with no formal training. She was born in 1890.

I was born in 1964 and was brought up understanding how hard life had been for previous generations.
Even so, I can still be shocked by what people endured. Just last night was reading a social history book that talked about a scarlet fever outbreak in London in the 1800s that came at the same time as a typhus outbreak - within 3 weeks one family buried all of their five children, and another buried four of their six children aged from a newborn to 12 years old. Only the two older teenage children survived.
In another chapter about the London slums of the industrial age a social reformer found five siblings sharing a bed with another deceased sibling as the parents could not afford to bury the dead child.
During the worst of the industrial age in London it was normal for the poorest families to be crammed into small rooms with no sanitation; parents conceived more offspring in beds that they shared with their current children, families cooked, ate, slept, went to the toilet in buckets, were sick, went through childbirth, all in the same tiny spaces.
I have always also thought about the fact that Patrick Bronte outlived his wife, all his daughters, and his only son. Unthinkable now.

@Veeveeoxox

The thing is you don't miss what you never had. Life was different back then but they would have made the best of it. The future generations will be saying 2022 was a shit time to be alive but a number of us don't feel that way . The COVID pandemic will be in the history books. I don't think there has been a time we have been ordered to stay at home under lockdowns.

There were isolation orders under Henry VIII and other monarchs during times of plague. You could be hanged if you defied them.

I have always also thought about the fact that Patrick Bronte outlived his wife, all his daughters, and his only son

Just looked this up. Maria Bronte, wife of Patrick and mother of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte, died of uterine cancer aged 38.

They had six children, Maria died aged 11, Elizabeth aged 10, the other four survived to adulthood, son Patrick, Emily and Anne all died around aged 30, Charlotte lived the longest, but only until age 39 .

It's only recently there has been a population explosion, due to better health and lower mortality rate ( in most countries)

@BarbaraofSeville - so sad, Charlotte died with her unborn child