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

[AhoyThereShipmates]

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?

Either at age 8 with scarlett fever or on many occasions with really bad asthma.

If I'd made them then I'd have succumbed during childbirth as I nearly died and needed transfusions.

Being premature and not breathing

It’s not ‘’unthinkable now’ at all that people die from complications of simple infections 🙄 It happens every day.
An ear or sinus infection can turn into a brain abscess that can easily be fatal, even with treatment.
Death from Sepsis isn’t ‘unthinkable’, it’s real, as is myocarditis after infection.

Yeah me to 😬 single woman, a nurse, had a child out of wedlock and I even have a cat - I'd have definitely been burnt at the stake.

I'd probably still be alive. My family are mostly long-lived, including the Victorian lot, many of whom were in farming. And having grown up in a 1970s farmhouse myself, I suspect I could run a Victorian household quite well.

I haven't broken a bone and avoided most childhood diseases, and tend not to get colds as badly as people I get them from, so I think I've got a pretty strong immune system. I wouldn’t have known I had covid if I hadn't tested, because I've had worse colds.

We were sufficiently well-off that we weren't living in cramped conditions. Even the ones which went off exploring bits of the empire seem to have survived whichever tropical diseases they must inevitably been in contact with.

My mother would have probably been out of it on gun and laudanum most of the time, mind you. And while I might have picked up syphilis, gonorrhea etc from sleeping around, I doubt I'd have had the same opportunities to do so.

Given I had Victorian female ancestors who did things like - one fell out with her father in the 1860s, because she insisted on going to college (she did; they later made up.) Another went out to Africa. I reckon I'd have been all right.

I got salmonella when I was about 4 and was extremely ill with that, so Victorian me would probably have died from that. Having said that, I contracted it from some chicken that my grandmother had tried to microwave, which wouldn't have been an issue back then.

Other than that, maybe tonsillitis, which I used to get on a regular basis in my childhood. Did people die of tonsillitis? If not, chances are I'd still be alive now at the age of 44, as I've been very lucky not to have had any serious illnesses.

So much medical ignorance on this thread!

Why are so many women led to believe they would have died in childbirth if not for the magic doctors and their scalpels?

Also it's not acknowledging that if we were giving birth as Victorians we'd be younger and slimmer so much lower risk.

This is quite interesting, in relation to maternal deaths.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3511335/#:~:text=Abstract,antibiotics%20to%20prevent%20puerperal%20infections.

And there will of course be a bias on this thread with women noting they would have died in childbirth without modern medicine because this is a thread about how would you have prematurely died, on a website with a great many mothers. Childbirth for many of us is the most medically traumatic thing we go through.

If you asked the same question on a climbing website, for example, it would be quite a different answer. And equally would have been different if the question was a straight 'would you have survived childbirth in the Victorian era, yes or no?'

As i posted earlier maternal and child deaths were extremely common in the 19thC

1 in 3 children died before their 5th birthday and it took until the 1950s for that to get to 1 in 20.

How do you imagine this happened? it was mostly the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines i.e those magical doctors and wizard like scientists.

Possibly my own birth (breech and prolapsed cord)

If I had survived that, I've never had anything else life threatening.

I would have died of sepsis and appendicitis aged 7 because I actually did die and was rescusitated and in ICU at that age from it.
I'd probably have been the main feature in one of those awful victorian death photographs surrounded by living relatives.

Well according to this thread they were all dying of tonsillitis……….

Either at birth, I was a premature twin, we were both Breech. Then at aged 10 I'd have probably died whilst getting transported for shoplifting some sweets from the Post office!

cholera was one of the biggest killers (it even got Prince Albert)

It was thought that he died of typhoid not cholera. However more recent thinking suggests that he may have had something else. Aggressive stomach or bowel cancer has been suggested as a possibility. Certainly he had been suffering from digestive ailments (attributed by QV to stress over their eldest son’s behaviour) for quite some time before he died.

Nah, you’d have had a darn good leathering from your DF and a very strong talking to from your DM (along with a public shaming at church) before it got to that point.

Same here; except I was 9.

I had retained placenta too - very common cause of death in childbirth. So that would have done for me if I had made it through childhood.

Starvation. In the Irish potoato famine.

I think my asthma? Which was never too bad since I’ve been old enough to remember feeling breathless but when I was tiny apparently it did result in a scary ambulance call out and trip to hospital.

Childbirth, breach twins delivered vaginally... nearly didn't make it
Overwork, knackered!

@Beeswood

I would not have been born. DM had to have her appendix removed while pregnant with me, so we both would have died.

^

Sorry to derail, but this actually happened to me too. They removed my appendix during my cesarean. Did your mum have hers removed during pregnancy, or during birth? That's the only other person I've heard of having their appendix removed. The surgeon was really shocked too, he said it was on the verge of bursting

@mackthepony

My goodness, we were very lucky!

My Mum had her appendix removed while she was expecting me, not at my birth.

even today 3 times as many children die under the age of one than 1-15 year olds I can't find UK figures but these are for England and Wales
"In 2021, 2,323 infant deaths (aged under one year) and 852 child deaths (aged 1 to 15 years) occurred in England and Wales; these figures were both higher than in 2020 (2,226 and 789, respectively).1 Mar 2023" office of national statistics
infant deaths are about 4 in a thousand ( still births are not included in these figures) currently maternal mortality is about 7 in 100,000 maternities

Acute lymphadenitis of trunk when I was 10. Needed lots of antibiotics. DC1 and maybe me too would have died in childbirth as he was back to front. I also had pre eclampsia.

I would have died after weaning due to coeliac disease. Almost did in the early 70s.