I 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:<p>> 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.<p>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.
Go back further and the tooth problems weren't really prevalent. Gotta get back before grain cultivation though.
> 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.<p>Same. Also profoundly grateful for vaccines.
It 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.
True; 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.<p>But rural Europe was no picnic either - you could 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.<p>Honestly, if you <i>forced</i> 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, Christoph Wren, the early Royal Society etc. while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a newssheet.
Some of these causes of death (“dead in the streets”, “scalded in a brewer’s mash”) remind me of The Gashlycrumb Tinies [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gashlycrumb_Tinies</a>
It lists "Dead in the streets" in the "List of notorious diseases". What a time it must have been to be alive :D
The 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.
Would 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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality</a>
It’s already been (at least partly) digitized, e.g. <a href="https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/" rel="nofollow">https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/</a><p>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.
Cause of Death:<p>> Scalded in a Brewer's Maſh, at St. Giles Cripplegate, 01.<p>That's… quite specific.<p>And then there is the joker who entered 'suddenly' as the cause of death.
Horrific, 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.
I 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.
If 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.