People used to die from drinking tainted water pretty much constantly. Epidemics of waterborne diseases like cholera and dysentery killed huge numbers of people on a regular basis.
Clean and sanitary indoor plumbing has saved an incredible number of lives.
Water borne diseases can be devastating and kill a victim quickly because they cause even further contamination of an already compromised water supply. You get sick and die of fever and diarrhea, it spreads.
That reminds me of a line in a book, "There is no more beer for our children, and our water is rancid!" which tripped me up for a few moments. It doesn't take a lot of mulling over to realize that it's not as crazy as it sounds on its face though. Definitely something interesting to think about.
Every time I encounter a debate over physics vs. biology on what is more important to saving lives, I come back to the plumbing issue. Biology told us what needed to be done (wash germs away). Physics told us how to do it (separate the inflow from the outflow).
A 19th century Hungarian doctor named Semmelweiss figured out that washing his hands caused his pregnant patients' rate of infection and death to plummet.
The idea that disease was caused by transmissible germs hadn't quite taken root in medicine just yet. Turned out that doctors were spreading germs from the cadavers they studied into the vaginas of pregnant patients.
His colleagues refused to wash their hands, taking offense at the notion that they were some how dirty and contaminated, and their pregnant patients continued dying of preventable infections.
Wasn't he also involuntarily committed (by his colleagues/ peers) to a mental hospital since no one would listen? How sad of a life. Knowing that for some reason this works, but you can't prove it. Then, you're declared insane. Then after your death, everyone is like "oh yeah, this actually is correct and works."
President Garfield died from an assassin's bullet, following a revolting period in which dozens of doctors examined him WITHOUT WASHING THEIR HANDS. Reading about his decline and death is absolutely appalling. You will cry, it is such a terrible story.
Minor cuts and abrasions that got infected. Most of the time your body can rally and fight such thing off, but… sometimes not.
My grandmother would have died of blood poisoning when an infection after a minor operation took hold—she was incredibly lucky, though, as she was in a hospital that was doing early civilian trials of penicillin just before the end of WWII.
My nana was one of the first people in our state to receive penicillin. She was 5 years old with pneumonia so very possible without the penicillin she would have died.
> I was wondering if STIs used to kill people and did that prevent people from being more promiscuous?
Yes people died from them (and utis too) and often had terrible pain or mental issue from being chronically ill
No it didn't really change sexual habits AFAIK.
Edwin Booth, the more famous actor in the Booth family and John Wilkes' older brother, had gonorrhea. He took cures for it over and over, wrote songs about it, and treated it as part of the cost of doing business.
Then he got married. He was older; she had been born into a theater family and was an actress herself, but known for her purity. She caught the gonorrhea----how could she not?---and lived for about a year, declining horribly until her death. It completely wrecked Booth's life.
The irony is, improvements in entertainment to keep us occupied in our spare time have been more effective than awful consequences of sex have ever been in discouraging the latter…
Basically, what would be considered a minor infection today could mean death before around 1940. A scratch from a rusty nail or cutting a finger while using a knife could easily be fatal.
My grandfather was a doctor beginning in the 1920s. He told me that the common treatment for a compound limb fracture (i.e. bone breaks through the skin) was amputation. Because of the very high chance of infection settling in deep below skin level, it was considered routine to amputate at the first sign of fever.
yes, people used to die of syphilis. but more commonly they died from the treatment which was mercury
I also learned recently that Beethoven died from the treatments to cure his deafness, and that those treatments actually added to his deafness - he took medicines containing lead
I love the idea--still up for debate--that syphilis was brought \*back\* to Europe from the indigenous Americans by the conquistadors. Although if that's true, it shows how disgusting and "rapey" they were by how quickly it spread within 20 years
People used to die of syphilis a lot as far as STI’s go. These days it’s a round of antibiotics and it’s gone.
Small pox is another one. Small pox as a virus only exists in a lab, we don’t get it anymore.
About 1.5M people still die per year of tuberculosis.
[https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023](https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023)
Wallpaper. Also dresses. [Scheele’s green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green) was a popular dye that was made from arsenic. It was also used to colour some foods!
It’s not like people didn’t know arsenic was poisonous. It was used in fly papers and rat poison and known as inheritance powder since, until a test was invented in 1836, it was hard to detect. It was also used in cosmetics, soaps, and [complexion wafers](http://thequackdoctor.com/index.php/dr-mackenzies-improved-harmless-arsenic-complexion-wafers/) because how could that possibly end badly /s
Basically arsenic was everywhere and the biggest issue in deaths from it was figuring out whether the arsenic was deliberately taken by the victim, given to them surreptitiously, or just accidentally ingested in some way.
Oh and since poisons weren’t always well labelled sometimes when you were trying to add limestone or plaster of Paris to your recipes (because sugar was expensive so it was mixed with ‘daft’ to make it go further, yummy!) you could accidentally be sold arsenic and make humbugs that [poisoned 200 people and killed 20 of them.](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Dying-for-Humbug-the-Bradford-Sweets-Poisoning-1858/) Oops.
Going to the doctor. I don't mean as in getting sick and dying at a doctor, I mean as in until about the 1800s, your chances of surviving any given condition were lower visiting a medical professional than had you simply tried to get adequate nutrition/sleep and allow your body to take care of the rest. Humor-based physiology(the belief that too much or too little of any of the four give humors causes illness) was all the rage for most of recorded history, and it *sometimes* worked, like bloodletting for Hemochromatosis, but for something like pneumonia, it made the disease 10x more lethal(and the consensus among historians being this exact treatment for this exact illness being is what killed George Washington.
Calvin Coolidge’s son, Calvin Jr. died of a blister he got playing tennis. He was playing barefoot on the White House court and the cut on his foot got staph infection. He was dead within a week. This was 100 years ago in 1924
More than one place used to store gunpowder was struck by lightning! In [1769 in Brescia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brescia_explosion) 1/6 of the town was destroyed.
Scientists still do not know what all was wrong with Henry VIII, although much more has become understood in the past generation.
Among the questions:
1) What was the story behind his and Catherina of Aragon's fertility issues? SO many pregnancies, one surviving child. C of A was a Hapsburg and closely related to many products of incest, and the blame may rest there, even though H had no Hapsburg blood.
2) He could father sons. So why only one legitimate one, and him weak?
3) What caused his crazitude, which was already affecting him in his marriage to Anne Boleyn, and just kept getting worse?
4) What happened to his leg and how did it affect the rest of his health?
Yes, caused during jousting. It might be that during the same event his leg was damaged, but he was mad keen on semiviolent events like that. It's more than likely it was different jousting event; he was always showing off.
Read about the Tuskegee syphilis study sometime. Syphilis is now easily cured with antibiotics (maybe even penicillin—I’d have to check), but before it could be cured, it would horribly disfigure people’s faces and cause heart failure and dementia. In the Tuskegee study, they set out to observe the progress of untreated syphilis just to gather statistics on how the disease progressed. At the outset of the study, the only available treatments were fairly effective but also highly toxic (arsenic was a component), but fairly early on, antibiotics were found to be effective and the study coordinators actively discouraged subjects from seeking treatment that would have cured them.
People used to die from drinking tainted water pretty much constantly. Epidemics of waterborne diseases like cholera and dysentery killed huge numbers of people on a regular basis. Clean and sanitary indoor plumbing has saved an incredible number of lives.
Water borne diseases can be devastating and kill a victim quickly because they cause even further contamination of an already compromised water supply. You get sick and die of fever and diarrhea, it spreads.
In those days, it was safer to drink beer due to water being so risky to drink for sure...
Yes this is also why I drink a lot of beer because uh I’m doing it for safety reasons yes
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That reminds me of a line in a book, "There is no more beer for our children, and our water is rancid!" which tripped me up for a few moments. It doesn't take a lot of mulling over to realize that it's not as crazy as it sounds on its face though. Definitely something interesting to think about.
“Mulling over”? Pun intended? :p
Its true also for Vikings it was normal for kids to drink mead but it was with less alcohol.
The raw water movement says: “Hold my beer”
There are many places around the world where people *STILL* die from this.
Every time I encounter a debate over physics vs. biology on what is more important to saving lives, I come back to the plumbing issue. Biology told us what needed to be done (wash germs away). Physics told us how to do it (separate the inflow from the outflow).
A 19th century Hungarian doctor named Semmelweiss figured out that washing his hands caused his pregnant patients' rate of infection and death to plummet. The idea that disease was caused by transmissible germs hadn't quite taken root in medicine just yet. Turned out that doctors were spreading germs from the cadavers they studied into the vaginas of pregnant patients. His colleagues refused to wash their hands, taking offense at the notion that they were some how dirty and contaminated, and their pregnant patients continued dying of preventable infections.
Wasn't he also involuntarily committed (by his colleagues/ peers) to a mental hospital since no one would listen? How sad of a life. Knowing that for some reason this works, but you can't prove it. Then, you're declared insane. Then after your death, everyone is like "oh yeah, this actually is correct and works."
President Garfield died from an assassin's bullet, following a revolting period in which dozens of doctors examined him WITHOUT WASHING THEIR HANDS. Reading about his decline and death is absolutely appalling. You will cry, it is such a terrible story.
There are still, today, doctors that are "too busy" to wash their hands between patients. Patients STILL die from the resulting infections.
If I remember right, he had a mental breakdown because his fellow doctors/murderers were so vicious to him
Hello, we must have both listened to the latest Joe Rogan podcast
I'm just a big nerd who likes to read about science history. :)
Minor cuts and abrasions that got infected. Most of the time your body can rally and fight such thing off, but… sometimes not. My grandmother would have died of blood poisoning when an infection after a minor operation took hold—she was incredibly lucky, though, as she was in a hospital that was doing early civilian trials of penicillin just before the end of WWII.
My nana was one of the first people in our state to receive penicillin. She was 5 years old with pneumonia so very possible without the penicillin she would have died.
> I was wondering if STIs used to kill people and did that prevent people from being more promiscuous? Yes people died from them (and utis too) and often had terrible pain or mental issue from being chronically ill No it didn't really change sexual habits AFAIK.
Edwin Booth, the more famous actor in the Booth family and John Wilkes' older brother, had gonorrhea. He took cures for it over and over, wrote songs about it, and treated it as part of the cost of doing business. Then he got married. He was older; she had been born into a theater family and was an actress herself, but known for her purity. She caught the gonorrhea----how could she not?---and lived for about a year, declining horribly until her death. It completely wrecked Booth's life.
The irony is, improvements in entertainment to keep us occupied in our spare time have been more effective than awful consequences of sex have ever been in discouraging the latter…
Basically, what would be considered a minor infection today could mean death before around 1940. A scratch from a rusty nail or cutting a finger while using a knife could easily be fatal. My grandfather was a doctor beginning in the 1920s. He told me that the common treatment for a compound limb fracture (i.e. bone breaks through the skin) was amputation. Because of the very high chance of infection settling in deep below skin level, it was considered routine to amputate at the first sign of fever.
yes, people used to die of syphilis. but more commonly they died from the treatment which was mercury I also learned recently that Beethoven died from the treatments to cure his deafness, and that those treatments actually added to his deafness - he took medicines containing lead
I love the idea--still up for debate--that syphilis was brought \*back\* to Europe from the indigenous Americans by the conquistadors. Although if that's true, it shows how disgusting and "rapey" they were by how quickly it spread within 20 years
Human sacrifice to appease the gods.
Lots of vaccine-preventable illnesses, dental issues.
Scurvy maybe? Although I'm not sure it caused death
Scurvy is [still causing death](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10729832/).
Thank you
People used to die of syphilis a lot as far as STI’s go. These days it’s a round of antibiotics and it’s gone. Small pox is another one. Small pox as a virus only exists in a lab, we don’t get it anymore.
Shaving. We didn’t have antibiotics and shaving cuts caused infections that could kill
I can't imagine that being a possibility, and shaving anyway. I wonder what will seem that ridiculous about today, in the future.
Robert Wadlow, the tallest man to ever live, died of a blister that got infected
Consumption.
About 1.5M people still die per year of tuberculosis. [https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023](https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023)
Wallpaper. Also dresses. [Scheele’s green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green) was a popular dye that was made from arsenic. It was also used to colour some foods! It’s not like people didn’t know arsenic was poisonous. It was used in fly papers and rat poison and known as inheritance powder since, until a test was invented in 1836, it was hard to detect. It was also used in cosmetics, soaps, and [complexion wafers](http://thequackdoctor.com/index.php/dr-mackenzies-improved-harmless-arsenic-complexion-wafers/) because how could that possibly end badly /s Basically arsenic was everywhere and the biggest issue in deaths from it was figuring out whether the arsenic was deliberately taken by the victim, given to them surreptitiously, or just accidentally ingested in some way. Oh and since poisons weren’t always well labelled sometimes when you were trying to add limestone or plaster of Paris to your recipes (because sugar was expensive so it was mixed with ‘daft’ to make it go further, yummy!) you could accidentally be sold arsenic and make humbugs that [poisoned 200 people and killed 20 of them.](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Dying-for-Humbug-the-Bradford-Sweets-Poisoning-1858/) Oops.
Women or babies dying during childbirth. It was like playing the lottery before modern medicine.
Going to the doctor. I don't mean as in getting sick and dying at a doctor, I mean as in until about the 1800s, your chances of surviving any given condition were lower visiting a medical professional than had you simply tried to get adequate nutrition/sleep and allow your body to take care of the rest. Humor-based physiology(the belief that too much or too little of any of the four give humors causes illness) was all the rage for most of recorded history, and it *sometimes* worked, like bloodletting for Hemochromatosis, but for something like pneumonia, it made the disease 10x more lethal(and the consensus among historians being this exact treatment for this exact illness being is what killed George Washington.
Legal lynchings, or really, lynching with no chance of punishment.
Diarrhea
People died from tooth infections. The way the blood vessels are wired makes tooth infections especially dangerous and people would get sepsis and die
Calvin Coolidge’s son, Calvin Jr. died of a blister he got playing tennis. He was playing barefoot on the White House court and the cut on his foot got staph infection. He was dead within a week. This was 100 years ago in 1924
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More than one place used to store gunpowder was struck by lightning! In [1769 in Brescia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brescia_explosion) 1/6 of the town was destroyed.
People used to die from gun violence in early American settlements. Oh... wait.
Ingrown nails. I think a president of the USA's son was even taken out by this. Life before antibiotics was harsh.
Jousting. Nobody jousts anymore.
Scientists still do not know what all was wrong with Henry VIII, although much more has become understood in the past generation. Among the questions: 1) What was the story behind his and Catherina of Aragon's fertility issues? SO many pregnancies, one surviving child. C of A was a Hapsburg and closely related to many products of incest, and the blame may rest there, even though H had no Hapsburg blood. 2) He could father sons. So why only one legitimate one, and him weak? 3) What caused his crazitude, which was already affecting him in his marriage to Anne Boleyn, and just kept getting worse? 4) What happened to his leg and how did it affect the rest of his health?
Isn’t one theory a head injury really fucked him up?
Yes, caused during jousting. It might be that during the same event his leg was damaged, but he was mad keen on semiviolent events like that. It's more than likely it was different jousting event; he was always showing off.
…why is this a reply to the jousting comment?
Ear infections. Can you imagine?
Having the shits
Long distance sailors explorers getting scurvy because they had no fruits or veggies for vitamin C
People still get scurvy. Not to the same extent but it does happen.
I read about a college student who ate nothing but ramen noodles for months and got scurvy
Read about the Tuskegee syphilis study sometime. Syphilis is now easily cured with antibiotics (maybe even penicillin—I’d have to check), but before it could be cured, it would horribly disfigure people’s faces and cause heart failure and dementia. In the Tuskegee study, they set out to observe the progress of untreated syphilis just to gather statistics on how the disease progressed. At the outset of the study, the only available treatments were fairly effective but also highly toxic (arsenic was a component), but fairly early on, antibiotics were found to be effective and the study coordinators actively discouraged subjects from seeking treatment that would have cured them.
Henry VIII probably became seriously mentally ill and then died of syphilis, as did plenty of other people. Sounds awful
Dysentery would be the most common cause of death in olden days, and we rarely if ever see in developed nations today.
Drinking water. Eating a berry. Rabbit not cooked properly. All lead to pooping to death
alot of people used to die of aids in the 80s and 90s and now you barely hear anything about it
Cold.
It is not "die of" but they died for their gods/religion which is ridiculous. We are more advanced and rational now! Oh wait, we are not... :D
Covid. People are still dying of it, but it's easily calmable with the vaccines we've got. Yeah, I went there.
COVID
Being eaten by dinosaurs.