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When was the last time you got an infection or disease that would have struck you down without modern medicine? I never have. In fact if hospitals didn't exist
by barrkel 9y ago
When was the last time you got an infection or disease that would have struck you down without modern medicine?
I never have. In fact if hospitals didn't exist and I never saw a doctor my entire life, I don't think anything would have changed.
I don't expect to live much longer than 60 as it is. Most 14th century monarchs, in the brief glance I did on Wikipedia before my answer, lived to 55 or 60 or so before they died of natural causes.
- ctdonath 9y agoI'd be dead four times over (and those are the obvious near-lethal maladies), and I just turned 50.
- TheDanielD 9y agoA small percentage of the population uses the majority of the health-care. You would have died back then, but most of us would have been fine.
- ghaff 9y agoThe age of monarchs has a strong bias toward those who made it to adulthood. A huge percentage of children died historically of diseases that are mostly prevented by vaccinations today. And since we're talking 14th century, there was also that Black Death thing that killed about half the population of Europe.
- umanwizard 9y agoBy the time you became a monarch you had usually already survived to adulthood (child kings existed but were the exception). This biases the statistics considerably. FWIW: I’d have (probably) died from pneumonia at age 5 without modern medicine. In reality it was curable trivially.
- chrisjack 9y agoYou don't get infection or disease because. 1- most of the people (and probably you too) are vaccinated and prevent the spreading of such disease. 2- Most of our current developed world is sanitize compare to back them 3- a cut could be lethal or could meant amputation in the middle age, now you just need to put alchool on it. 4- you might had suffer from malnutrition even has a monarch, lack of vitamin C could lead to scurvy in the winter and lack of iodine in the food might cause Iodine deficiency (wich lead to Goitre or Cretinism) If you your so keen of wanting to live that life style, you can find a sweet amish girl and go live in her community.
- barrkel 9y agoHow could I control the destiny of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in an Amish community? That's the lifestyle explicitly being referred to when talking about swapping with a monarch.
- ghaff 9y agoI can't help but feel that there is some mild trolling going on this thread :-) If not that, there are at least a couple of people who are seriously optimistic about their personal invulnerability in the absence of modern medicine, healthcare, and public health practices.
- crusso 9y agoI think that things like herd immunity just aren't intuitively understood or respected by the people who think that just because they haven't had a health emergency in the modern world they haven't benefitted from their existence in the modern world.
- chrisjack 9y agoFrom Health A millennium of health improvement (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm) The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties. From this history.stackexchange[1] thread, on user found that the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years in England. In the same thread it seem that it was 48.5 depending on how you made your calculation and 53.4 years if you made it to 20 year old. [1] -https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-the-life-expectancy-of-a-medieval-european-monarch https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...