before modern medicine, how did medieval people live to their 80s? How did they survive common conditions that could result in death like open wound infection, tooth infection, diseases, unhygienic food and water?
In: Biology
They got lucky, basically. You don’t need modern medicine to live into your 100s, you just need the right combination of luck and genetics. In fact most people that live that long don’t really need much medical intervention to live into their 80s anyway. It’s not like modern medicine slows aging; it just removes barriers to getting to old age.
It’s not impossible for someone to go their entire life without a significant injury or life threatening illness. Most medieval people that lived through their teens could reasonably expect to live into their 50s-60s. After that things like nutrition, genetic predispositions to disease, and accumulated injuries really start to take their toll on the body. But if you had good genetics, alright nutrition, and didn’t contract any fatal disease, you could live a long life. Plenty of people lived into the 80s, 90s, or even early 100s back then. It was just much less common.
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