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?

Miscarriage

No idea but I want to write confumption 😁

Cottagecheeseisnotcheese

I have to say that I agree with you in principle. many of these births might have been more traumatic, more difficult, more long draw-out and painful, but they would not necessarily have been fatal.
Same with many of the diseases mentioned.

However many of them would have been. That is I think a reflection of who chooses to comment on the thread rather than that they have all got the principles of victorian medicine wrong!

For example, I posted that I would have died at birth as my mum had placenta previa. Without a C-section, she would have bled to death. If a doctor was present they may have saved me. I probably would have read the thread and not posted if I didn't have that to tell.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that many children born with disabiities would have not been resusitated at birth, or not been given medical treatment to help them survive. My Granny had triplets in 1940s. They were taken to the nursery and she was told not to visit them as they would not survive. After she died we found the babies death certificates. They lived for 10 days and she never saw them, they were basically taken off to die. There is no record of what was wrong with them.

I think we forget that the main reason we vaccinate against eg measles is to stop the death of the 2% and the % who go blind and/or deaf from measles too. It is less about those who survived.

Many babies these days are born to people whose genetic inheritance in previous eras would have meant they would either have been picked off by natural selection in either childhood or in childbirth.

I don’t doubt people with serious genetic conditions like haemophilia, cystic fibrosis, etc probably died young. However, DH and I found out recently we are both carriers of a genetic metabolic disorder, which arose 50 generations ago in one person in Central Europe. While children in affected families used to die of then unknown causes, until testing was developed (either genetic or urine analysis); the metabolic consultant told us the gene variant is common in the European population. Even as carriers, we may suffer some symptoms, but I find it amazing that one person has so many descendants, who survived for it to become common?

it doesn't account for the difference between an actual maternal death rate of around 5% and the reports here of over 75%

The thread asks "what would you have died from"
It is self selecting by its nature.
People are reporting what they would have died from, neither of my dsis would have written childbirth because they didn't have the issues I did.
So the 1/3 sample of death by childbirth in my family becomes 100% representation on the thread.
Neither figure is factually wrong they are just answering different questions.

i wouldn’t have been born- emergency section had I arrived I’d have died cos I have thyroid issues in my 20s. My kids wouldn’t have been born either.

@steppemum

Of course I do! I've mixed with women with children all my life! I imagine anybody, who has acted as a "midwife" and delivered babies regularly, since time immemorial would know that? I certainly think my great grandfather, with 40 years experience of medical practice, in the days before the NHS, OOH, locums, etc, who had to attend to his patients all hours of the day and night, would have been aware of breech babies delivered feet first?

I am relating stories I grew up with, from my great grandfather, my grandfather, my great uncle and their colleagues (I remember going to the houses of my grandfather's friends in other medical specialities as a child). I cannot see why the family would lie? Why would they make things up?

Quisquam

I am really not sure what you are replying to. I haven't said that anything was made up or directed a comment at you at all.

I made a general comment about breech births, loads of people on this thread saying that they would have died at birth because they were breech, but that does not indicate death at all, many breech and footling breech births are born naturally. So while some would have been a cause of death, most wouldn't.

sorry, I see that I did quote you.
I can see why you thought that.

I wasn't suggesting it was a made story, but trying (obviously badly) to say comethign about breech births in general.

Most c sections done now are for the benefit of the baby not the mum. (Pre eclampsia being the most common exception)

These c sections births, without which so many women think they would have died, likely saved the baby but in the vast majority of cases the mother would have survived.

A lot of modern childbirth complications are caused by modern lives- obesity, older first time mothers, a higher proportion of births first births etc.

Obstetrics in the olden days was an exercise in saving the mother. A healthy baby was a bonus. That has flipped now. They got the fetus out whichever way they could. This was brutal. But it saved millions of women's lives.

Aged under 5 I would have died of a chest infection. No antibiotics back then.

My allergies, fairly quickly. Failing that, my recurring ENT infections.
Neither my sister nor mother would have survived my sister's birth

the question is what would you have died of as a Victorian? and the answer for more than 50% of the population would be as an older aged person as having survived childhood which 66% of population did despite all the infections (the % was greater by 1900 than it was in 1837) etc etc the average persons life expectancy at birth was 40+ years but if you lived to 5, the average life expectancy then was about 60

I think that we are interpreting the question differently.

You are interpreting it as what did Victorians in general die of.

Many of us are reading it as what would WE have died of.
Obviously we can actually say, but we can look back at our lives and say - if I had had that in Victorian time, then I would not have survived.

Due to response bias, people only post if they have something to say, so most fo the respondants will be from people who have survived something which would have killed them 150 years ago.

Nothing wrong with that. But it is not the same as they way in which you interpreted the question. But your interpretation is more like historical research and less personal response.

sorry - we CAN'T actually say

The Victorian period was a long one: there are some differences between 1837 and 1901.

At the beginning of Victoria's reign, about 30% of infants did not reach the age of 5; by the end, it was a little over 10%.

At the beginning of Victoria's reign, a caesarian was a virtual death sentence and usually done only if the woman was already dead or dying, in the - usually vain - hope of saving the baby. After surgeons realized the necessity of suturing the wound in the 1870s/80s, you had a decent chance of survival if the operation was carried out at the beginning, before infection had already been introduced,

BTW, an interesting fact; the first c-section in the UK which resulted in the survival of both mother and baby was carried out in the 1820s by Dr. James Barry. Only after Barry died, many years later, was it discovered that 'he' was actually a she, christened Margaret, who had spent much of her life disguised as a man, as the only possible way of pursuing a medical career at that time,

@steppemum that is in part correct that there is a response bias, but many are saying that they would definitely have died from measles for example when actually they would almost certainly have recovered it may have taken longer to recover they may like today have suffered complications, ( the mortality rate was 2% then) measles is a virus if you catch it today antibiotics don't help, there were no vaccinations so it is likely the vast majority of Victorian children were exposed to the Measles virus

it is like in Little House on the Praire they all suffered really bad scarlet fever they were very ill but no one died, they all recovered completely; in the novels Mary's blindness was attributed to this bout of scarlet fever but in her memoirs it was a different event a few years later that caused the blindness and was probably meningoencephalitis once living in de Smet

Measles would not have killed many of us. I am 66 and my entire school had measles at some time or other, none of us were seriously ill.

@Astrabees that is exactly what I meant in Victorian times mortality from measles was 2% it had dropped to 0.2% by the 1940's without vaccinations or antibiotics ( not that they work for measles as it is a virus) just general better health in children

There was an interesting thread on here a while ago, someone asked how bad measles actually was and if anyone had had it as a child.

Well the MMR came in in the 1970s. So anyone aged over 55 may not have had it, and may have had measles.

What was very striking was the number of people who posted who had hearing/sight loss from having measles. In fact a close friend of mine, who is now 63, is deaf in one ear due to childhood measles.

We tend to forget that some of these things had other side effects too, death wasn't the only concern. I grew up with the story of Helen Keller, who was left deaf and blind by measles.

I had measles when I was 18 months. No ill effects at all.

You weren't malnourished and living in a slum.

@steppemum I’m around your friends age and was seriously ill with measles as a child. It was a lethal infection before the vaccine programme, which I think was started in 1970 in the U.K.

@BessieSurtees in 1940's the rate had already dropped from 2% mortality in the Victorian period to 0.2% in 1940's by the 1970's it had improved even more; there were vast improvements in mortality well before vaccinations
the 2% were largely those malnourished and in slums, and so even in the slums 98% survived in Victorian Britain and 99.8% in pre WWII
I was a child before MMR and had all 3 as a child we were miserable with measles 2 weeks lying on the sofa with my mother no doubt running around like a scalded cat I was about 6 my sister who was 2 suffered more, my mother says she wasn't iller it is just harder to occupy and keep ill 2 year old quiet and calm as explanations don't work, I don't recall any one in my primary about 300 pupils having any serious side effects, I escaped chicken pox as a child despite it going round the school numerous times, rubella and mumps were very very mild in fact I only know I had rubella at a later test, i probably had it when my sister had a few spots but they never found spots on me
a bit like how some would never have known they had covid unless they had tested as no symptoms whatsoever including the elderly and frail and others were very very ill and a small percentage died

There were plenty of other diseases going around too that we just don’t see in this country too - cholera was an absolute killer but until it was worked out that it was a waterborne disease, there were epidemics all the time in cities especially. People would drop like flies from that. Who knows how many of us would have had something like that or similar, something that modern hygiene standards have eradicated in the developed world.