[TimTheTinker]

People really underestimate just how hard life was in prior ages, especially due to disease.

An old person my wife once talked to said that "penicillin changed everything". It certainly did, along with vaccines and other very effective treatments (including hand-washing!) for once-deadly diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, even leprosy.

Death was a major part of life for folks living prior to the late 1800s. Everyone experienced frequent life-threatening sickness and death of close friends, infants & children, family members, and acquaintances.

If I had a choice, and avoiding a very hard life & early death were my only criteria, I'd choose to live now rather than then, regardless of social status.

[hatchnyc]

I recently received a copy of a letter with some information about my ancestors from the 1700s. Apparently they owned an inn in a small village in France (it is still there and looks like a relatively nice place to me, so…I guess they were doing ok?). They had 10 children, of whom 6 died before the age of 3. The mother died at age 39, in the last 8 months of her life 3 of her children died.

Yeah, no thanks.