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Dumb Ways to Die: Printed Ephemera
- Freak_NL 11mo agoCause of Death: > Scalded in a Brewer's Maſh, at St. Giles Cripplegate, 01. That's… quite specific. And then there is the joker who entered 'suddenly' as the cause of death.
- omnicognate 11mo agoHorrific, I imagine. Brewer's mash is usually a little below 70°C. If someone fell in they probably survived with extensive scalding and died later from infection.
- softg 11mo agoIf the main purpose of this was to satisfy people's morbid curiosity that makes a lot of sense. Maybe they made up some juicy deaths in slow news weeks even.
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoI imagine "suddenly" would be things like a heart attack – if you're not taking measurements as the patient is dying, you don't know enough to deduce it from symptoms, and don't perform an autopsy, it's hard to tell what happened.
- RankingMember 11mo ago> St. Giles Cripplegate I'm convinced the British have a monopoly on unintentionally hilarious/ironic place names.
- jjgreen 11mo agoNonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartown,_Huddersfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartown,_Huddersfield
- benterix 11mo agoThe stats from enclosed page are quite interesting. People speak today about depression/suicide epidemic, but when you look at that old numbers, "grief" and "hanged themselves" together give a top percentage.
- constantcrying 11mo agoRead the rest of the page. These are diseases the author deems "notorious". Taking grief and hanged themselves together that makes around 500 out of 229250 deaths. Which is very low. Globally around 1% of deaths are suicides, which is more than 4 times higher.
- graemep 11mo agoIt was even lower going further back. People had harder lives in so many ways, but they did not commit suicide so were in some way mentally healthier.
- s1mplicissimus 11mo agoIt lists "Dead in the streets" in the "List of notorious diseases". What a time it must have been to be alive :D
- tensegrist 11mo agoalso "Suddenly" / "Sodainly"
- plomme 11mo agoWould be really cool to graph out causes of death over the centuries! Wikipedia cites continous publication from 1527 to 1858[1]. Collecting the data seems daunting, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality
- libraryofbabel 11mo agoIt’s already been (at least partly) digitized, e.g. https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/ https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/ One thing you will have trouble with however, is that disease categories and the process of determining cause of death changed a great deal from 1527 to 1858. So the categories you're working with aren't stable at all.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- plomme 11mo agoWow, thanks!
- libraryofbabel 11mo agoI went to grad school for history, and it completely cured me of any nostalgia for or desire to live in the premodern past. The past is an interesting place, but also a place of unmitigated horrors. If you were lucky enough to live into old age in relatively good health, you would have seen many friends die young, and half of your children as well. Just the number of deaths from "teeth" in the Bills of Mortality says it all. These would have been extremely painful worsening tooth infections eventually resulting in sepsis or a brain infection, and death: > In seventeenth-century London — and for that matter most other places — teeth were a leading cause of death, owing to poor oral hygiene and no effective means to treat infections at a time when extractions — without anesthesia — were performed by the local barber. I've had at least one infection that would probably have killed me in the 17th century. I am grateful for the existence of antibiotics.
- nobodyandproud 11mo ago> I've had at least one infection that would probably have killed me in the 17th century. I am grateful for the existence of antibiotics. Same. Also profoundly grateful for vaccines.
- belorn 11mo agoIt should be added that in the 17th century, only 8% of the population (Europe) lived in cities. Germany today has a larger population today than the whole Europe during 17th century. London during the 17th century is kind of the worst case scenario with high population density and a port city with high amount people traveling in and out, but limited access to medicine and hygiene.
- libraryofbabel 11mo agoTrue; in fact mortality in 17th-century London was so bad that it required a net flow of migrants just to keep the population stable. Most of all, you were at much higher risk of plague during the plague epidemics. But rural Europe was no picnic either - you would still be likely to die in all sorts of painful ways, from sepsis, diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc. And my god, it would have been dull. Honestly, if you forced me to go back to the 17th century, I would probably take the risk and live in London. At least there is the possibility of crossing paths with Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, the early Royal Society etc. while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet.
- teeray 11mo agoSome of these causes of death (“dead in the streets”, “scalded in a brewer’s mash”) remind me of The Gashlycrumb Tinies [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies
- ai-christianson 11mo agoThat makes it seem like we're all in someone else's "dwarf fortress" game :)
- collingreen 11mo agoai-christianson needs alcohol to get through the working day
- jmkni 11mo ago> In early modern Europe, almost 50% of children did not live beyond age 15. Around a quarter of infants died before their first birthday. That is absolutely wild.
- libraryofbabel 11mo agoIt is one of the most striking things that makes life in the premodern past so unimaginably different from today. To be a parent was to suffer continuous tragedy. An example: Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714). She was pregnant 18 times, and not one of her pregnancies resulted in an adult child to inherit her throne. Miscarriages, stillbirths, and five children born alive. Four died in infancy from various causes. One, Prince William Duke of Gloucester, lived to age 11, when he died of an infectious disease - probably smallpox. His death was one of the key events that led to the House of Hannover (the current British royal family) inheriting the throne in 1714. Smallpox probably killed about a billion people, many of them children, before its eradication in the 1970s due to a global vaccination campaign. You can see it is listed in the Bills of Mortality in TFA, always with a high number of deaths.
- kazinator 11mo agoUh oh, "Griping in the Guts" is listed; HN beware!