Okay guys, I'm the Doctor and I'm going to take you back in time and talk about how people died before modern medicine. Fair warning: it involves a LOT of puss, there's a surprising dearth of aliens, and I don't have a sonic screwdriver.
This thread brought to you by twitter scholars speculating that people did "just fine" in the past without medicine. tl;dr for this thread: they did not. They really did not.
Let's address the first obvious point which is the average age of death in whatever era whatever region pre-medicine. It's around 30 or so usually. But fear not! That's just the average! Because infants and children died basically all the time.
But there's another actual death bump around about twenty years of age. Now you can attribute this to maternal mortality and interpersonal violence, but it's actually way higher than those things can explain. So what's going on is IF you survived childhood ...
... you did so often with what you can imagine as massive scars to your immune system. And if at any point your growth stopped in childhood your catch-up growth is scheduled for, around 20 years of age. So if you get say, the flu at 20 with all that your body might just give up.
There is actually a third reason why the average age at death is so low and it's due to a statistical artefact in how we estimate adult age in skeletons but basically we age skeletons up to about 50 and then just say they're "50+"
So yeah that category could and probably does include octogenarians, but even ignoring that the average age at death is still being deflated by all the infant and young adult deaths.
So now let's get into a few things that can kill you. Spoiler alert: it is everything. I'm pretty sure I've said this before but it's really hard to find a pre-modern skeleton that isn't hashtag f-ed up. And if you've EVER so much as broken a bone, you know why.
Firstly, there's a ton of diseases we vaccine smash away that killed basically most people in the past. And you don't really get a warning of who's going to die with infectious disease. I noted above the whole biological stress thing, but it's hard to tell who that's going to hit
So families may have been trying to do their best for their kids' health - and that includes families with resources - but if they get measles ... they might die. And yeah there's folk remedies for everything but ... well, I've seen the bodies. The "remedies" don't work.
So now let's talk about syphilis. Everyone loves syphilis. Well, they like getting it. Don't know that they like the final stages. If you want a trip, do an image search for "Treponema pallidum." Cool, right? Now image search "syphilis in bone."
Those weird lesions you see on the frontal bone would have been visible in life AND there are rhinomaxillary changes meaning basically your entire face gets royally f-ed and not ... NOT the way you presumably caught it.
We'll get back to vectors of infection in a minute, but I do want to point out today you can avoid syphilis with a latex condom and if you catch it you just need a course of penicillin. Practice safe-sex, but your outlook with syphilis now is a hell of a lot better than in 1830.
The other thing about syphilis and several other "sexually transmitted infections" is that infected moms can pass it on to their kids. Do an image search for "yaws." So, I'm kinda simplifying here but there's a less awful form of syphilis.
Basically, if you're in a warm climate and have a lot of skin to skin and the bacteria is present you can get the not so bad version of syphilis without having sex. And it's really gross and awful and dangerous, but it basically immunises you from the disease later in life.
So you might have gross scars all over your face but you get to keep your nose. Score. Ironically the reason there was a syphilis outbreak in both the Americas and Europe around the point of "first contact" is because the Europeans were in a colder climate and so ...
while it seems they already had syphilis in Europe it sort of boomed through sex at ports. And the Europeans had killed off so many Native Americans that they lost the immunity to the nastier type of syphilis and ... yeah. Nose losing shit show.
I mean I gotta say, even if you are an absolute misanthrope the idea that genocide can be the means of making a disease stronger and more awful should in and of itself be a deterent to committing genocide.
But I'm getting off-topic again. Let's talk of more lost noses!
But I'm getting off-topic again. Let's talk of more lost noses!
Leprosy and Tuberculosis are up next! Yay! You may think I'm very weird for handling these together and you're right about me being weird but that's it. These two are caused by closely related bacteria both from the genus Mycobacterium.
There's some debate about exactly how these interact but both of them are currently treatable. It's relatively easy to catch TB because someone with it coughs and you come into contact with the droplets you could be infected.
With leprosy you have to have prolonged intimate contact usually. So now, if you get either of these you go to the doctor and you get medications or therapy and you can carry on. But in the past before there was medicine the cure for leprosy was a bell and a bowl.
You can linger for some time with untreated TB but it does kill a lot faster than leprosy. And both sort of eat your body. Leprosy starts at the hands and feet and works its way in and TB just wrecks havoc on your insides. Image search "Pott's spine."
So let's get to all that healthy food you're definitely eating and how that's going to let you live forever. I give you ergot poisoning!! Basically, this is when you've had a wet season and your grains haven't dried well and end up growing a fungus on them.
You may not even notice it's there, but oh boy does it notice you. Ergot poisoning can cause blindness, spasms, brain damage, and death. And it wasn't *super* common in the past, but it happened enough that there's paintings of people who never recovered.
The reason I bring this up is your "healing herbs" are not regulated. So yeah there's food safety standards now, but there weren't in the past AND American vitamins and a lot of holistic medicine is not overseen. You just don't know what they put in your "healing" tea.
So now let's talk about injuries and cavities. Today if you break your arm or god forbid lose a limb or get a toothache you go to the doctor or the dentist and they clean it all out, cut off anything that's died and medicate you to prevent infection.
In the past you were lucky if you could get your arm set or your tooth pulled. People regularly died from infections from lost limbs because even though others absolutely would care for them that is a massive gaping hole into which all manner of nasty can invade your body.
Having seen an amputated bone from someone who likely died of sepsis from it I can describe the nature of that bone as "bubbly." Like, imagine you're cooking pancakes and it's not quite but almost time to flip. Like that, but much more and swollen.
And the reason for all that weird bone growth and bubbly is because the body is desperately trying to repair itself while an infection rages inside the actual bone. Those bubbles are from puss bursting through the bone at places.
Today, losing a limb is a BIG DEAL but we rarely have infections like that because .... modern medicine. Also, name one person you know who's died of a dental infection. Yeah, in the past that was a thing. Can you imagine the halitosis?
There's ton more on this. I haven't even talked about epidemiology etc, but yeah you have modern medicine to thank for being alive. In the past it's kinda a coin toss if you yes you could have made it to adulthood. So sure eat healthy, but don't discount MDs and medicine.
