A lot of people just died. Wide-spread antibiotic use has been one of the major contributing factors in the population growth over the past century. That's why

A lot of people just died. Wide-spread antibiotic use has been one of the major contributing factors in the population growth over the past century. That's why having many children was preferable in time past: it was a foregone conclusion that several of them would probably never reach adulthood, often due to infectious disease