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This feels wrong, though. Measles alone meant you likely lost kids in that age range. Antiseptics, as well, were huge in saving people from from otherwise dea

• Amezarak 4y ago
  Otherwise healthy people rarely die from nicks. Me and my kids regularly get cuts or miscellaneous wounds and I’ve never needed antibiotics or to do anything besides wash them with water. Measles is fairly low mortality in absolute terms. Even within living memory, getting the measles and the mumps was a normal childhood experience. The overall mortality is 1 or 2 per thousand and the disease is most dangerous in under 5s and over 20s. So before widespread vaccination, everyone was exposed before their 20s and we excluded under 5s from the count.
  • taeric 4y ago
    Do you regularly walk through non paved paths? Work in soil? Both common things in the past. Both common ways to have a non safe nick. Edit: I realize 5 is the cutoff for this study because measles and the like. It is deadly to youth in pretty stark contrast to older.
    • Amezarak 4y ago
      Yes, I live in a rural area and work outside a lot. I also get scratched to bleeding by animals fairly frequently. My kids are magnets for all kind of mysterious injuries. It is simply not common to get serious infections from everyday wounds for otherwise healthy people. Indeed, for most of human history, cities had higher mortality than the countryside due to disease. "Random cuts" are not nearly as dangerous as "lots of people." “Deadly” can be true for measles in young children but again, it’s important to be clear that the actual mortality is very low. It certainly contributed (with many other diseases) to lowering life expectancy for infants, but it was not even close to a death sentence; the vast majority survived. As I said, it was basically a rite of passage even for our grandparent’s generation.
      • selimthegrim 4y ago
        Anthrax, coccidioidomycosis, schistosomiasis, hantavirus… you live in a charmed area no doubt
        • Amezarak 4y ago
          It has nothing to do with being charmed. These infections are generally rare to start with, and are not automatically life threatening. There's a reason humans survived to modern day.
          • riffraff 4y ago
            > There's a reason humans survived to modern day. well we made a bunch of kids to offset deaths. I mean, sure, getting chicken pox was relatively common when I was a kid, and few people died of it. But a low percentage of all the population is still a large number of people.
      • byyyy 4y ago
        Makes sense. In movies I see things like a dirty arrow or a sword is guaranteed death from infection. Assuming the movie portrayal is accurate what is the differentiating thing that causes a dirty wound from a weapon to kill but not a dirty knick?
        • Amezarak 4y ago
          Well, movie portrayals of anything are generally not accurate at all. I would say that infections from battle wounds are probably more likely, but that probably has more to do with the surface area and size of the wound and health leading up to the battle. A big scratch from a briar or a chicken might bleed a lot, but the wound will be closed fairly quickly. A big scratch from a sword is going to take a lot longer to close, and you might have been near-starving and short on sleep for weeks beforehand and have been crammed in tight conditions with 10k other guys. That said, it's still greatly exaggerated to say a war-wound is guaranteed death. People got hurt in battle a lot and generally made it out OK. You can find lots of famous examples where even to me it's quite shocking they were able to survive at all without modern medical care. For example, not only was the hard-partying Alexander the Great wounded about a jillion times in battle, one of his last battles involved a punctured lung. It probably eventually contributed to his death sometime later, but it's surprising to me he even lasted the night!
• dham 4y ago
  > Measles alone meant you likely lost kids in that age range. I get what you're saying, but Measles is definitely the wrong thing to put here. Most people over the age of 35 aren't going to get what you're saying.
  • taeric 4y ago
    To be fair, most of us also don't know the pain of an infected wound. Has sadly gone down the same route as so many folks thinking they have had the flu.