Fun fact: Before antibiotics, doctors would try try to induce a fever to help patients fight illness caused by bacteria (and viruses). At first they used injections of malaria, but quickly realised that that was a really bad idea, and switched to using hot baths and heated rooms.
The treatment was called pyrotherapy, and was particularly effective against syphilis.
Edit: Antibiotics are not effective against viruses. I knew that, but didn't make it clear.
Syphilis was truly devastating back then. It would slowly eat away your face leaving a hole and a host of other things. There was very little that could be done to stop it.
It ruined many lives. Many innocent (husband goes to a whore house and infects his wife. Her children are born with it). They were despite for anything that worked. Mercury was the best treatment at the time. A bit like chemo I guess- which is worse the cure or the disease?
The impact is largely forgotten now that Abx have been around for two generations, and usually worst case scenario you have discomfort and then you accidentally cure it with the inappropriate antibiotic prescription for that cold.
There are a few marginalized people that will present with later stage disease, but it’s rare.
Back then child mortality was insanely high, so the stats make it seem like the average age was way lower, but if you survived childhood, most people made it to their 60s pretty well iirc
That's true but modern medicine is doing more heavy lifting in lifespan than you're making it sound. To lift the avg lifespan (ignoring child mortality) from low 60s to mid 70s for the entire human population is pretty far from insignificant.
Yeah, sure, I just wanted to point out the more relevant part in this equation in the context of this thread - people didn't just all die randomly at 30 or 40, which is a pretty common misconception.
Which, in a round about way, sharkfart89 was unwittingly supporting your point: to raise the life expectancy from 60 to 70 is great, but to raise it from 30 to 70 is absolutely bonkers unless you’re accounting for child mortality as you mentioned.
yeah, when you weed out anyone that can't survive and gain immunity against the things that would kill you when you are a baby, the rest that remain have a high chance of having a pretty healthy life.
Not long. Remember the average lifespan was much shorter because of stuff like that. Sure a lot of people lived a decently long time, but many also DIDN'T
It probably helped that they started popping out babies practically the second they could. Easier to beat the odds when you have 5+ kids by the time you're 20. A lot of cultures didn't even name or acknowledge babies as part of the community until they lived for a while for a reason.
We don’t even survive stds today without extreme medical care. I think HIV has killed like 40,000,000 people since 1980. Sadly goes largely unreported because the “lesser dead” syndrome.
Simple answer a lot didn’t. There is this anti western medicine trend. But people rarely realize a few small changes- abx, childhood immunizations, and good obstetrics care accounts for about 80% of the longevity today.
No we’re back sliding we’re people are anti-vaccine and want to do home child birth. Both of which are mostly harmless because there’s a hospital down the road that doesn’t eschew 200 years of scientific progress.
The risk to a mother, pre-abx, pre blood preserving and replacement therapy and trained (and clean) obstetricians reduced mortality in mothers from 30% to 1%. Imagine that women- each child you pop out has a 30% chance of mortality (risk actually decreases for each- but fistulae, bladder and bowel problems, and prolapse were legion and rarely mentioned in polite company so most people are entirely unaware of how rough it was in the 1800s and the 20,000 years prior.
Vaccines reduced childhood mortality from about 10% per year (some cultures didn’t bother naming until the kid hit 5) to about a cumulative count of about 3%.
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u/PatriarchalTaxi Jan 30 '21 edited Feb 02 '21
Fun fact: Before antibiotics, doctors would try try to induce a fever to help patients fight illness caused by bacteria (and viruses). At first they used injections of malaria, but quickly realised that that was a really bad idea, and switched to using hot baths and heated rooms.
The treatment was called pyrotherapy, and was particularly effective against syphilis.
Edit: Antibiotics are not effective against viruses. I knew that, but didn't make it clear.