The reason for this is that they had very little control over nature and saw it as something of a deity that they had to appease. A breech baby was pretty much

The reason for this is that they had very little control over nature and saw it as something of a deity that they had to appease. A breech baby was pretty much a sentence to an agonizing death for both mother and baby (for a portrayal, see House of the Dragon). A compound fracture was also either a death sentence or at a minimum and amputation. If you lived in an area with cyclones, you didn’t know when you could get catastrophic winds. Anytime you sailed out of sight of land, could be your last. Floods and drought were far more devastating then. A pandemic might easily kill a 30% or more of the people and you had no idea how to deal with it (or even 90% as some of the New World civilizations experienced after the arrival of the Europeans). In that environment, nature was seen as a capricious deity that you wanted to mollify. After the scientific revolution, we now see nature as a system that is governed by laws that we can understand and take advantage of to improve humanity. We can monitor hurricanes. We can ship food to areas suffering famine. We are able to use medicine and surgery to make childbirth much less dangerous and much less painful. We don’t viscerally feel as if we are at the mercy of nature. Even with the recent earthquake, look how quickly the discussion has turned to how the ignoring safety codes in building led to a large portion of the deaths. We don’t look at a natural disaster now and throw up our hands and sacrifice virgins to appease the gods, now. Instead, we look at what we can do to prevent and mitigate a future occurrence. I for one, much prefer how we are now then how we were before.