Would you still be alive ?

[frostyknight]

 

[chirp]

This is an interesting topic. I had bronchitis many times as a child, beginning when I was just a few months old so that may have finished me off quickly especially if I had lived in poor, damp conditions like some of my city-dwelling ancestors probably did. I got all the usual childhood diseases (severely) so may not have survived all of those. Also as someone else has mentioned, being short-sighted would have made life rather dangerous. I often think too how people dealt with pain before pain-killers became available. I know there were various plant remedies but not everyone would have access to them.

[familydar]

unless we were rich and/or titled many things that afflict us now would have been unlikely a century or so back - high cholesterol and its knock-on effects, obesity, anything associated with a sedentary lifestyle.  We may not have lived long enough to get what we now regard as diseases of old age such as dementia, arthritis, various cancers - we'd have been worn out at 50.  And accidents would have been of a different nature - farm machinery rather than motor vehicles for instance.

[Calverley Lad]

I would just be another name on a headstone for sure!
First heart attack at 38 years old and followed by a triple by pass later.
4 heart stents later together with a defibrillator before I reached the age of 70 years.
Regards Brian [coffin dodger]

[Redroger]

  The lower life expectancy was largely due to the abominably high rate of infant and  child mortality during previous times. If you made it to 10 then you had a good chance of living to age 50 and above.
There is a Roman memorial panel to a former gladiator whose age was shown as C (100), but then he was considerably more of an exception than now.

    The shorter life expectancy does account for the much earlier average of marriage in previous times, people in their early teens marrying, of course there wasn't a lot of point delaying marriage till 30 if life expectancy was 26 or so!
    Authority finally caught up in 1929 in Britain when the legal age of marriage was raised to 16 for both sexes, from 12 (girl) and 14 (boy)

[iolaus]

Possibly - and some of the reasons given above yes your chance of dying was higher but not always - there have been cases of premature babies surviving years ago - although most didn't and thankfully the balance has swung the other way and many do survive with support.  And the needing a caeserean thing a lot of emergency sections done these days may not have resulted in the woman's death (although the morbidity levels were certainly higher)

Personally - I needed a corneal graft when I was 7 - but that wouldn't have killed me, but would have impacted my life
I had a small haemorrage after my third but I don't think it would have killed me

However did then develop pancytopenia due to pernicious anaemia which even these days has a 50% mortality rate (it just doesn't usually get to the level I was at), so that would have killed me

[Liviani]

I'd have passed on aged 11 as that's when I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Needing insulin daily since then.

It was 100% a death sentence prior to the invention of inject-able insulin, known as 'sugar sickness' at some point in history.

[Redroger]

Diabetes was known as sugar well into the 1960s. My father developed it in 1957. As he was an engine driver this should have ended his career. However, after 3 months off sick ( no sick pay!!) he was passed fit for local yard work, and from May 1958 resumed duty as a mainline express driver, the only restriction being he was not allowed to drive single manned diesel railcars. The first ever to resume full duties.