![]() So, there we do have a particular pitfall as well. In a world where blood transfusions are not available and germ theory hasn’t been conceptualised yet, (Again! As was common up until the past hundred or so years!) there are even more issues to considered. That is because it is a massively traumatic event and there are any number of things that can go wrong, both for those giving birth and those being born. That is still actually the case! It was also, of course, the case in the early modern period, and the modern period up until the twentieth century, really. Women, for example, die at a really high rate in childbirth. There are, of course, some caveats to this. Now if you remember how averages work, you will realise that if half the population are dying before they are two, and the average age of death is 35, that means that if you made it out of infancy (a pretty big if, TBH), you were likely to make it into your seventies or even later. ![]() How high? Well roughly half of all people born died between being born and two years of age or so. It was the same six hundred years or so before that. For more on this, go have a look in any graveyard even from the Victorian period and see how many children are buried there. Here is the thing about that: in the medieval period, just like in the early modern period, just like in the modern period up until we invented vaccinations, infant mortality was incredibly high. Do you remember how averages work? A quick refresher: to get the average age of death you take the age of death of a total population, and then divide that by the number of people involved. Allow me to elaborate.įirst of all, the idea that the “average life expectancy” means that “most people” only lived to 35 is way off. Friends, this is extremely not true, and this myth is also damaging to us now. ![]() What gets trotted out, over and over, is the idea that “the average life expectancy in the medieval period was 35, so when you were 32 you were considered an old”. One of the really rampant myths that I deal with on a regular basis is about life expectancy in the medieval period. (Zing! LOL, help, join my Patreon.) Secondly you spend a bunch of time fighting against the myths about a thousand years of history or so that we have created to feel better about ourselves. When you are in my line of work, well firstly, you don’t have any. ![]()
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