Modern medicine erases the horrors of widespread child mortality often depicted in gutting detail in 19th-century literature.
In the 1800s, ~50% of U.S. children didn’t live past age 5. An English scholar reflects on how undermining #vaccines risks reviving those forgotten tragedies. theconversation.com/infectious… @bookstodon #Bookstodon @histodons #Histodons #PublicHealth #19thCenturyLiterature #VictorianEra #Jane Eyre
Infectious diseases killed Victorian children at alarming rates — their novels highlight the fragility of public health today
Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Popular authors like Charles Dickens documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.The Conversation
⠠⠵ avuko
in reply to The Conversation U.S. • • •For people interested, I’ve worked with Model Life Tables for estimating realistic population structures of Ancient Rome.
TLDR: it was a death trap brimming with disease that only fitted the worst Coale-Demeny life tables.
Anyway, if you want to see what life without vaccines, healthcare and sufficient nutrition is going to be like, here you go:
un.org/development/desa/pd/dat…
Model Life Tables | Population Division
www.un.orgHteph
in reply to ⠠⠵ avuko • • •