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?

Probably by either getting stuck up a chimney or getting flattened by a pit pony.

Well the MMR came in in the 1970s

I think it was the single vaccines, not the combined MMR.

Factory work was dangerous too, in the days before health and safety. Cotton mills were always damp and full of fibres, no guards on the machines, dangerous chemicals like phosphorus in match factories or mercury in hat factories.

I agree - I wouldn't have died from the measles/mumps/rubella/chickenpox which I shrugged off in the 1960s and would probably have defeated almost as easily in the 1860s. But I might well have died from a random cholera/typhoid epidemic. Tens of thousands did....although of course millions didn't.

While only a small minority would have died of childhood diseases I don't want to seem to say that the MMR isn't worthwhile.

A death rate of even one in a thousand is appalling by modern standards for a disease that almost every child would get without vaccination. Not to mention the damaging and much more common side effects of sight and hearing loss from measles or sterility from mumps.

Where did I say I was? MN is a bizarre place sometimes.

I had such severe hyperthyroidism (graves disease) at age 30 that there were concerns for my heart. Had I survived I'd probably have spent much time exhausted on a chaise longue. I'd certainly have been rendered infertile and not have had the children.

It is actually often possible to survive an infection without antibiotics. Probably not as pleasant, but our bodies are clever things and we have lost a lot of the wisdom that our ancestors had.

Anyway, in a few years time we're going to have to find out how to survive infections when bugs have become resistant.

Yes. I was born 1972 and had measles jab at 6 months and a pre-school booster. I had rubella jab age 11. I've never been inoculated against mumps, and I've never caught it, but I do seem to have a sturdy immune system.

I think the point was that measles is much more likely to be fatal for children who are already in poor health: often as a result of poverty and poor nutrition, which were very common in Victorian times.

I would also add that it's been recently found that measles can wipe out existing immunities to other illnesses, making other illnesses more likely and more severe. Thus, some children may have died not of measles, but of other things as an indirect result of having measles.

That being said, the biggest infectious killers of children seem to have been not measles, but the various less specific respiratory infections and forms of gastro-enteritis.

yes you are right.

But the point was that vaccinations against measles started about then.
I was born in 1967 and had measles vaccine at some point, but not as a baby I don't think.

Lots of people on this thread have also mentioned rubella as if that was an issue.

Rubella as an illness is usually extrememly mild and many don't even realise that they have had it. Few spots, maybe fever and that's it.
The issue has always been that pregnant women catch it from kids and then it effects the unborn child.

and mumps, very rarely fatal, and most recover fine, but teen boys getting it are often rendered infertile.