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Original poster

If you were a Victorian, what would you have died of?

636 replies

AhoyThereShipmates · 17/03/2023 15:45

Reading a children’s book to my daughter that is partly set in a Victorian workhouse and it got me thinking.

I had a broken collarbone aged 9, and a pulmonary embolism, and then of course childbirth. If I was Victorian any of these might have killed me, but my money is on childbirth. DH reckons he would have been carted off to an asylum with unusual thoughts and would have just wasted away. Go on, indulge me.

If you were a Victorian, what would you have died of?

OP posts:
Isahlo · 17/03/2023 20:32

Being born or giving birth I imagine

echt · 17/03/2023 20:34

Actually, I am a Victorian. In Melbourne.

I would have bled to death after going birth.

weegiemum · 17/03/2023 20:37

I was a healthy child, but would certainly have died in my 40s (my 3 births were fairly uncomplicated, though I would probably have enjoyed the benefits of Chloroform!!).

In my 40s I had a very complex broken ankle that needed surgery - I would probably have lost my foot. The following year I almost died of galloping sepsis so if the ankle hadn't finished me off, the sepsis would have got me.

I'd have been bedbound by then due to an autoimmune disease, and I suppose never have broken my ankle in the first place!

belleager · 17/03/2023 20:37

Potato Famine, maybe.

(I mean anything around my birth or health now could have modern environmental causes).

CommanderSeven · 17/03/2023 20:39

Whooping cough and German measles before age of 1.

KvotheTheBloodless · 17/03/2023 20:40

Asthma, aged 6 (assuming I'd survived all the awful childhood illnesses up to that point!)

DysonBison · 17/03/2023 20:43

Croup, aged 18 months.

I did some family research in lockdown and found a never-mentioned little sister of my great-grandfather who had died of croup at the same age, on Christmas Eve, exactly a hundred years before. No wonder my grandparents were apparently frantic when I fell ill with it.

MrNorrell · 17/03/2023 20:45

I've not had anything life threatening (yet) but would be even blinder than I am now due to various eye infections not being treated. So maybe wandering in front of a horse and cart or getting crushed in factory machinery out of sheer clumsiness.

More likely to be one of the many things I've been vaccinated against.

lurchermummy · 17/03/2023 20:48

Asthma probably or the rampant chest infections I used to get as a baby from living in a damp flat

Spudlet · 17/03/2023 20:48

Mum was induced a little prematurely with me as she had a stillbirth with her first pregnancy. So I might well not have actually made it into the world alive at all.

TowerRaven7 · 17/03/2023 20:51

Definitely Exhaustion, although the phrase Natural Decay has a snazzy edge to it!

Wiccan · 17/03/2023 20:54

If it hasn't been mentioned already maybe dying locked away in an asylum for being the mother of a child fathered by a prince who didn't want to be identified 🤔 just a thought . Other than than that prob everything that didn't have a vaccine !

TroysMammy · 17/03/2023 20:57

Being very small for my age, probably something chimney related.

Lolacat1234 · 17/03/2023 20:58

I had a PUJ obstruction last year. It's a blocked kidney (ureter tube gets kinked, I think mine shifted during my second pregnancy or I was born with it) and it means the kidney swells with urine as it can't get through quick enough. When it reached breaking point I ended up in hospital with a mammoth kidney infection and in the 3 months between then and my operation I was on antibiotics a few times with nasty kidney infections. I'm pretty sure in Victorian times without antibiotics I would have turned septic and died.

Lolacat1234 · 17/03/2023 20:58

Also I had pneumonia as a child so that might have done it!

Ladyglittersparkleseriously · 17/03/2023 20:59

Childbirth, definitely. I had a 40 hour labour, crash c-section and PPH. Thanak goodness for the NHS!

Judgyjudgy · 17/03/2023 20:59

This is such an interesting thread, it makes me realise I've been pretty lucky so far, unless you could've died from chicken pox which I had when I was 7

frugalkitty · 17/03/2023 21:00

I had measles around a year old so most likely that. If not, childbirth.

listsandbudgets · 17/03/2023 21:01

Probably a mystery bug age 3. Similar to meningitis.. but not. Hospitalised me for 10 days would probably have killed me in earlier times

Lolacat1234 · 17/03/2023 21:01

Actually yes I would probably have died along with my mother at my own birth! I was a kiellands forceps baby born in a lot of distress so in victorian times I probably wouldn't even have made it out :(

autastic · 17/03/2023 21:02

At birth because even when I was born the means by which I lived had only been about for 3 or 4 years. My mum was a midwife and she said the idea what at the start of her training she saw children dying or having complete blood transfusions and then still dying and I was saved by a light.

ninjafoodienovice · 17/03/2023 21:04

If the recurrent ear infections as a child didn't do it then bleeding to death in childbirth would have been my fate. Cheery thought

LittleBear21 · 17/03/2023 21:07

Either a burst gallbladder/gallbladder infection at 27 or pneumonia / lung infection at 35

Essexgirlupnorth · 17/03/2023 21:08

If an infectious disease hadn't killed me off already. A septic missed miscarriage would have done.

HoobleDooble · 17/03/2023 21:09

Whooping cough which I had before I was old enough for my jabs. Either that or my DS and I would have died instead of having an emergency C-sec.

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