Would you have survived in the middle ages?
How about you? How long would you have lived in the middle ages? Ignore all the general risks - like typhoid or the plague or cholera - that everyone would have faced in general. Let’s assume you were lucky and missed those. (Unless by some chance you actually DID face one of them in your life.) Also ignore the fact that your deadly injury might have been caused by modern technology, like an auto accident. Just pretend you were trampled by a horse or something. So, given the injuries and illness you’ve faced in your life so far: Did you make it? Would you have survived to your current age?
I would have died at 13 due to a ruptured appendix.
May 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
I don’t believe I would have survived. At 6 mos., I had severe asthma and it was touch n’ go even in the mid 60’s (before bronchodilators like ventolin became available), but I think the oxygen tent was the technology that carried me through.
May 12th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Likewise, I would not have reached 40, my current age. In fact I would not have reached 30 without late 20th Century medicine, which has saved my life several times over thanks to neurosurgery and radiotherapy.
Even without that however, in the middle ages 40 was a ripe old age, and a minor disability such as my acute myopia would have severly limited my life options and hence probably my income and quality of life
May 12th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Hmm, I probably would have succumbed when I had double pneumonia at the age of 4. If, by some miracle, I managed to live through that (maybe caused by some modern “bugs”) then I think I would have been doing just fine - mostly because “living” in the middle ages was not done in a chair in front of the a computer - much more exercise was involved :) What I’m trying to say - probalby not eloquently - is that most of my problems are due to a more sedentary lifestyle.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I’d still be here, unless I had succumbed from infections due to eczema, or had failed to recover from low-grade pneumonia a couple of years back. I’ve never been in a hospital overnight, except to welcome my daughter Ariel to the world.
She was delivered by Caesarian, which was deemed necessary because she wouldn’t put her head down prior to birth, preferring to swim around in there indefinitely; and because of Mary’s prior Caesarian, natural birth was seen as risky. The earlier pregnancy, three weeks overdue, might have killed Mary or Ariel’s half-brother.
A World Lit Only By Fire gives some pretty discomfiting descriptions of the state of life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Software problems pale in comparison; at least we’re indoors.
—Michael B.
May 13th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I definitely would not have survived the birth of my first child. I had to have a caesarian due to extreme pre-eclampsia. Then of course, I suspect that infected, impacted molars might’ve been a problem in my early 20s. Hm. And if I go back further in my childhood, well, I survived measles, chickenpox, mumps, but had a really bad case of tonsilitis that kept me out of school for a month with high fever. It was knocked down by penicillin (that I later developed an allergic reaction to after another case when I was 20). So I am glad to be alive in this age.
May 13th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I had five lots of corrective surgery before I was 9 to fix my eyes. I guess I would have lived to the average age of a blind man, assuming I hadn’t stumbled under the cart! Other than that, nothing serious to stop me.
May 24th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
I think some combination of nearsightedness, mononucleosis, and the walking pnuemonia I had at age twelve would have done for me.
Not to mention the diseases we _don’t_ think about much today: cholera, smallpox, typhus, influenza, and plague.
May 27th, 2009 at 1:59 am
I don’t believe I would have survived. At 6 mos., I had severe asthma and it was touch n’ go even in the mid 60’s (before bronchodilators like ventolin became available), but I think the oxygen tent was the technology that carried me through.
June 9th, 2009 at 6:39 am
Probably wouldn’t be here either, Chrons would have done me in either the first two times (in my teens) or later on in my 20s. And if I had managed to get through those, it would probably get me around now, when expecting!