You might find these tidbits interesting and relevant to your point!
Children weren’t named until their 8th (female) or 9th (male) day alive, precisely because of the extremely high chance of them dying before that. Likewise, young children who are interred in family tombs before a certain age are sometimes left unnamed; while children over a certain age (nonstandard, but around ~6 years) tend to be named on the tombs and mourned deeply with specific epitaphs.
There’s actually some evidence that there wasn’t a large gap in the lifespans of the poor and the rich. What was most likely to kill a person - disease - was pretty evenly distributed. The low level of medical understanding at the time meant that high-quality physicians weren’t much help for the biggest killers - much of their advice was useful, but applicable primarily as prevention and things that ordinary people could (and would) do; while ‘cures’ for diseases were generally not much more than placebo. Roman surgery and injury treatment was fantastically advanced, though, probably no better place in the world at the time to break something or get something lodged in you, lmao.
If you were lucky, you could be like the Emperor Vespasian (wealthy, but not fabulously so before his Emperorship), and have all three of your kids live to adulthood. If you were unlucky, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who was ultrawealthy before he was even married), you might have only 5/14 kids live to adulthood - or fewer. The Emperor’s rhetoric tutor, Fronto, had only 1/6 of his kids survive to adulthood, and none of them were even ‘lucky’ enough to be alive simultaneously.
Modernity can be terrible, but damn, is it a step up from the past!
I’m Indigenous Canadian from northern Ontario and I was the first generation to be born in a modern hospital. Both my parents were born in the wilderness with traditional midwives. Dad was born in the cold of November and mom in the late winter of March … I can’t imagine what they had to go through for those births in the winter time let alone in the summer months. And in both their families their mothers had many children but many also died. Dad’s mother had 12 pregnancies but only 8 survived to adulthood … mom’s family had 10 and seven survived (an interesting side note in her family was that she had an uncle who died before the age of ten due to poisoning when he accidentally ate the wrong plant … and in her father’s family, they had 15 children! but only 6 survived).
Like the ancient Romans, my family who lived on the land survived without modern medicine just through shear volume and repetition than in any kind of modern knowledge, training or technology.
One of the biggest achievements of modern medicine was in saving infant mortality. Up until about 100 years ago (more like 120 years ago) it was a miracle to even be born. I think infant mortality back then was about 50%. The only way the human species survived and grew was just in the number of pregnancies a woman could have.
You might find these tidbits interesting and relevant to your point!
Children weren’t named until their 8th (female) or 9th (male) day alive, precisely because of the extremely high chance of them dying before that. Likewise, young children who are interred in family tombs before a certain age are sometimes left unnamed; while children over a certain age (nonstandard, but around ~6 years) tend to be named on the tombs and mourned deeply with specific epitaphs.
There’s actually some evidence that there wasn’t a large gap in the lifespans of the poor and the rich. What was most likely to kill a person - disease - was pretty evenly distributed. The low level of medical understanding at the time meant that high-quality physicians weren’t much help for the biggest killers - much of their advice was useful, but applicable primarily as prevention and things that ordinary people could (and would) do; while ‘cures’ for diseases were generally not much more than placebo. Roman surgery and injury treatment was fantastically advanced, though, probably no better place in the world at the time to break something or get something lodged in you, lmao.
If you were lucky, you could be like the Emperor Vespasian (wealthy, but not fabulously so before his Emperorship), and have all three of your kids live to adulthood. If you were unlucky, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who was ultrawealthy before he was even married), you might have only 5/14 kids live to adulthood - or fewer. The Emperor’s rhetoric tutor, Fronto, had only 1/6 of his kids survive to adulthood, and none of them were even ‘lucky’ enough to be alive simultaneously.
Modernity can be terrible, but damn, is it a step up from the past!
I’m Indigenous Canadian from northern Ontario and I was the first generation to be born in a modern hospital. Both my parents were born in the wilderness with traditional midwives. Dad was born in the cold of November and mom in the late winter of March … I can’t imagine what they had to go through for those births in the winter time let alone in the summer months. And in both their families their mothers had many children but many also died. Dad’s mother had 12 pregnancies but only 8 survived to adulthood … mom’s family had 10 and seven survived (an interesting side note in her family was that she had an uncle who died before the age of ten due to poisoning when he accidentally ate the wrong plant … and in her father’s family, they had 15 children! but only 6 survived).
Like the ancient Romans, my family who lived on the land survived without modern medicine just through shear volume and repetition than in any kind of modern knowledge, training or technology.
One of the biggest achievements of modern medicine was in saving infant mortality. Up until about 100 years ago (more like 120 years ago) it was a miracle to even be born. I think infant mortality back then was about 50%. The only way the human species survived and grew was just in the number of pregnancies a woman could have.