AIBU to wonder how some people coped in former times?

[Flyingfish2019]

When they had 12 children, husband was working down the mines 16 hours a day, no transportation, no frozen/canned food, no fridge, constantly pregnant. No help if somebody suffered a disability (and I think this was likely working down the mines those days).

I just wondered because I have far less then 12 children and dh does not work down the mines and still we are often soooooo tired. Children keeping us awake play a role in this... how would we cope if there was 12 of them and we had to live under the conditions described above?

Yes looneytune I do agree with you on that front.

They were simpler times but I am not sure if people who were really poor were happy loonytune. It must have been incredibly stressful for a man with a large family. He would have had to work long hours of possibly back breaking work. If he was ill or just not fast/strong enough he could be easily replaced at any time. Women were worn out having baby after baby, and just because they had lots of them didn't mean they worried about them any less. They also had to keep the man in their life happy, and worry about him keeping his job, because not only would they be penniless, they would often be homeless too if he couldn't work. I am sure they made the best of it and snatched any bit of happiness that came their way, but no doubt there was a lot of abject misery.

Yep, it was cold, miserable and filthy and people were ill nearly all the time.

As anyone with 6 children will testify, just because you have lots, you don’t love them less, and losing one is as heartbreaking as if you just had one.

I can’t imagine anything more terrifying that being in a freezing filthy slum with no money or food or heating, nursing an infant with say diphtheria or TB , knowing you can’t afford a doctor and all you can do is hold it and love it and pray it doesn’t die, whilst looking at your 6 other starving children and knowing they will probably catch it too 😔

When I listen to anti vaxxers I always wonder what they would think had they experienced something like that. Those poor women helplessly loosing child after child.

For anyone who has read ‘call the midwife ‘ book, Mrs Jenkins story is one of the saddest things I have ever read and her complete downfall through no fault of her own and how it affected her has stayed with me since I first read that book well over 10 years ago.
And the poor woman whose whole family died of TB as she was the carrier (Unknown at the time). All for the lack of a BCG jab 🙁. Think that status in the follow on book ‘farewell to the east end’.

Evacuation in WW2 was one of the things that led to the NHS. The state of some of the children from the city slums horrified many of the families they billeted with. So many stories of children who had never slept in beds or used inside toilets. I read a story of a group of children who arrived at their billet and were found to be wrapped in bacon fat and newspaper under their clothing. It had hardened on their chests but was used as a way to keep warm in winter. Many evacuees are obviously still alive today.

I do a lot of family history, and the whole family dying of TB from one carrier is completely accurate.

You can spot a likely family with tuberculosis just from the death index, because they die one-by-one over a few years. From five children, maybe one or two children will survive. Those children live into their 20s, marry, have children, then die leaving their own children uncared for – and having passed the TB to those children and their spouse. And the loop goes round again.

It's awful. Just awful. I don't think people living today (in the UK, at least) can understand what TB meant. Thank god.

The other thing was venereal disease. It caused miscarriage and early death. I remember watching a programme about infant mortality and miscarriage due to this reason. It was surprisingly common.
Also of course passed into the poor unsuspecting wife with resultant effects.
All those men in the war using brothels and before when it was common for the gentry to use brothels too.

And I expect not a few doctors, in the pre-NHS era, although qualified by the standards of the day may be regarded as little more than outright quacks these days.

Hells bells, my paternal grandmother was told by her doctor that her toddler son was suffering from persistent chronic headaches and earache because "he thinks far too much for his age."

Blimey!

Certainlymerry there’s a theory that that’s what killed Mrs Beeton. She had 11 miscarriages and died in her late twenties. Poor woman.

I was watching a documentary on Inca Fado mummies in a S America . They had done an ultrasound through the cloth on one, The person was a young adult who probably died from rotten tooth or abscess

Interesting fact- Julie Andrews’ maternal grandparents both died of syphilis.

One of my ggg grandfathers had 22 children by 2 wives. 19 children, both wives and him died of TB over the years. We know this as he was a tenant farmer and it was commented on in the records of the hall who owned the farm. Just unbelievable that so many of them died but gg grandmother survived.

Dockray, that is so tragic. TB was so serious reaching epidemic proportions that at one time x-ray vans came to streets in every city and people queued up to be Xrayed. Not many records were kept and many had regular Xrays. Many job applicants had to have a new Xray for the employer before they were taken on.

Now of course we know how dangerous the X Rays could be, causing cancer and one wonders whether this has something to do with the lung cancer?

Dockray that is so very very sad. That poor woman surviving all those deaths. She must have been utterly heart broken.

Interesting about Mrs Breeton and Julie Andrews, tragic too. Doing some family research, I came across a relative who had over ten children who all died very young. I think it likely her husband was a sailor and wondered if syphilis was to blame.
Of course it could have been any number of other things but fitted the pattern described in the programme I had watched. Can’t remember the specifics now.

TB is thought to have killed 1 in 6 throughout the 19th century - even if you assume some people were thought to have died of consumption when today, we might diagnose a different disease, that's still a hell of a lot of the population.

I have worked in slums in very poor parts of the world - people don't 'keep their mental health' they are often very very depressed.

I was born in the 60s and even the conditions then seem alien to today. We lived in 2 rooms, no hot running water, and outside toilet shared with other families, and my parents and 3 kids. People used to go to have a bath, in baths that were at the local swimming pool.
I know when all 3 of us went to have our BCG vaccination, the test beforehand showed that we had all been exposed to tuberculosis, although mercifully none of us had caught it.
I do wonder how my mum managed in 2 rooms with 3 kids. It must have been hard for her. We were fine as at the time, we did not know any different.

My gran was one of 7 (surviving) kids, born in the 1900s, when she was 10 her father was killed in the pit and, as the eldest daughter, she was expected to look after all her siblings while her mum took in laundry/mending, did some cleaning at the nearby 'big houses' and helped the local undertaker lay out bodies. To the day she died in her 90s she had an all consuming fear of the Workhouse and wouldn't accept that modern day nursing homes would be any different.

I live in a Victorian terrace on a long long street, which was purpose-built for the workers at a new mine being sunk at the time.At the time it was built there were shared outside toilets and wash-houses round the back of all the houses. I can imagine that life was physically a lot harder, but the community spirit would have been so much greater, all the women in the back yard scrubbing and boiling their smalls on a Monday morning, sharing gossip and childcare. I've seen a few old press cuttings of obituaries of people on the street and the lists of neighbours' names attending go on forever. These days, out of nearly 200 houses, I know the names of people in a grand total of 11 of them.

I saw a documentary about Spanish flu and how many were affected both times and how it mutated. Very interesting.
It was named Spanish Flu because it killed the Spanish King, I believe? But originated in Europe.
Anyway, fascinating if you ever get to see it.
Coul be on iplayer but was a couple of months ago.

Older ones helping with smaller ones. Not being as involved in what the kids are doing (no helicopter parenting), ignoring them a lot I imagine

I saw a documentary that said that the Spanish Flu (the one from 1917 / 18) had started off in the USA, in soldiers training camps, and that it had spread via troop movements.
Apparently it got the Spanish Flu name because Spain was the first country to acknowledge the disease. Other countries had been downplaying it in case the reports sapped morale and damaged the war effort. Spain was neutral so not worrying about damaging the war effort.

3 of my grandfather’s siblings died from that.

Jump

Did it feature Soldiers and nurses coming home on ships, making it to the hospital and dropping dead?
I've not seen anything so interesting in ages.
There was another that find lots of plague victims buried in mass graves in London.

I live near a plague pit. A new housing estate has been built and the pit is in the centre, they're not allowed to build on it so they made a play area over it instead. It's from the 17th century.

RomanyQueen1 it featured a troop carrier going from the US to Europe arriving with lots of infected dying soldiers and nurses.

That sort of thing would spread much faster these days with all the air travel people do.