So glad to not be living in 1850...

[JFSinIL]

I am doing genealogy, and in looking up a great-great grandpa I came across the Mortality Schedule for Huron Co, Ohio in 1850. Gramps died at age 50 of...consumption (TB). Other folks died of:

 

Dropsy (congestive heart failure)

scarlet fever

cholera (LOTS of this one!)

croup

flux

typhoid fever

dysentery

and "Old Age" (71!!!)

[aggieamy]

I agree. The past can keep "the good ol' days". I'll enjoy my polio-free life and clean drinking water.

[aggieamy]

I agree. The past can keep "the good ol' days". I'll enjoy my polio-free life and clean drinking water.

[Beth S]

Our son had his appendix removed on last week. We actually talked about the fact that people routinely died of this back in (maybe) 1850.

[Kari C in SC]

My dh would have died when he was 19 from TB. I would have been an 18 year old widow with a baby. Thankfully, he lives in these times and just took the meds for like 9 months.

[Slartibartfast]

I am sure I would have died from bronchitis. I have had several bad cases where the Drs have gotten vexed with my lack of improvement and I ended up with shots in the butt. (shots in the butt work GREAT! I highly recommend them!)

 

My family built a home that is now a historic site owned by the state, there is a cholera victim buried in the front yard. :sad: Hooray clean water!

 

They had ten children, five died as children. That would have been around 1850 I can't fathom that.

 

People often discuss what time period they wish they had been born in but I can't think that way. I love our modern medicine. We are so fortunate to live in the world we do now.

[KungFuPanda]

Here here! My grandmother lost a son, and nearly lost another due to Rh incompatibility. Only two generations later my children were protected by a routine shot.

[Starr]

But my house would be new!

[gardenmom5]

I would probably have died delivering my first child. she ended up a C-section. I have a great-aunt who died at four days from jaundice. (and her first cousin died at five days from jaundice.) it was the 1950's before modern medicine was more help than questionable.

[meggie]

In conversations like these, I can't help but be grateful for grocery stores! Oh my heck, I can go and pick from a wide variety of meat and produce not to mention all the luxuries. I thoroughly enjoy not having to butcher and pick my own dinner.

 

Don't even get me started on the laundry

[Corraleno]

Here here! My grandmother lost a son, and nearly lost another due to Rh incompatibility. Only two generations later my children were protected by a routine shot.

 

 

My great aunt lost all eight of her babies due to what was almost certainly Rh incompatibility. I can't even imagine the heartbreak of that. :crying:

 

I had the rhogam shot, but DS was an emergency C-section, so we both would have likely died in childbirth back then anyway. :sad:

 

Jackie

[Lilaclady]

So glad I have the clean water and easy access to it too.

[Dahliarw]

I have a relative who died (back in the 1800s) in a saw mill accident which took his arm. He died from blood loss and infection after several days, from what we found out about it. Today there would be reconstructive surgery, antibiotics, and really strong narcotics.

[Bang!Zoom!]

I was looking at a family last night which lived in England at this time. They lived in what they called a "workhouse". This one was in Southwell, and I was very perplexed by the term, "inmates of Southwell" in their records.

 

So being the nosy chick I am, I went researching for a while. The family entered the workhouse, were separated from their children. The men and women did not fraternize they were kept apart. Dinner, if they were lucky enough, was a teaspoon of oatmeal in 9 oz. of water, boiled. The women did laundry and such, the men were assigned to break up rocks to create gravel for roads.

 

Sometimes, they received shipments of material which were not rocks, but were bones. Horses, cats, dogs, cattle..whatever. The workhouse was required to make X output of this stuff, so...when times were tough and they didn't have enough bone material to crush, they'd source it from nefarious sources. The condition these people were in (as in starving to death, literally) caused them to pull meat from the bones. Many were beaten if they were seen doing this.

 

One day, an overseer (which was required by English law to check on his workhouse 2x a year) dropped by, but was not allowed to enter. He was a little tiffed about it and blustered his way in. He journaled what he saw in there, causing quite a scandal.

 

This story is the third time in my genealogy I've found cannibalism events in my family tree. Yeesh.

 

The 1850's were rough as it gets.

 

It was interesting to note also in this family, that 2 children were born to the mother while in this workhouse. I'm very suspicious if these are the natural children of the father. The father was declared legally insane and died in the workhouse. His wife and 7 children went to Canada. The youngest, Lydia, I have a photo of, and her rough beginnings show in her face, statue and overall appearance.

[elegantlion]

Egads, I forget about stuff like that when thinking about the past. I probably would have died at 5 when I had something like an asthma attack and had to be hospitalized for almost a week. I certainly would have died from my cancer at 26. It has a high cure rate now but even as recent as the 1950s it was commonly a fatal diagnosis. Of course, there is no definitive cause for my cancer, it could have been poor nutrition as a kid (we did a lot of boxed type food) or gluten intolerance (my mom baked a lot). Maybe if I had grown up eating more "real food" I wouldn't have had cancer. But, nonetheless, I'd be dead at age five anyway. My ds was an emergency c-section too. Wow, going to kiss his forehead and be thankful I was born in this age.

[LucyStoner]

My grandmother's brother died of tetanus when he was 8 and that was in the early 20th century.

 

On my dad's side, in the 1850s most of my grandmother's relatives we know anything about were still in Ireland. On my grandfather's side, they were dirt poor subsistence farmers in western North Carolina, with more kids dead than living.

[Wabi Sabi]

My great grandmother died in the 1910s. She fell and broke her arm while doing some sort of suffrage work in Boston. Shortly thereafter gangrene set in and she died. Her husband was already dead (not sure what happened to him), so my grandmother and great-uncle were left orphaned as very young children.

[JessieC]

My great-grandmother died in the 1920s or 30s when cheap dye from her hat got into a pimple on her forehead and poisoned her bloodstream, or so the story goes.