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
Those who did where very lucky, it’s just a big number case, when you have a lot of possible outcomes even the least possible are realizing
I know that many often boiled water and/or added a small amount of alcohol to water from almost any water source.
A ton of people died from what would now be considered minor infections and untreated ones, but just look up methods for treating infections back in the day.
Meats were often salted/smoked and many things were pickled in order to preserve foods.
Also, most spent their days working hard and eating foods (not packed with a bunch of unhealthy additives and ingredients) for sustenance.
We’ve changed genetically over time, too.
My great grandmother mowed her lawn, weed eated, crawled down to change the oil in her car, and climbed up onto her roof to do her gutters until near age 90.
My grandmother, her child, had lifelong issues from gestational diabetes and died in her early 70s. Also could barely do much of anything physical from age 50 on.
It’s random luck, with the odds skewed one way or another by medicine and healthcare (or lack thereof). Think of everything like D&D and it clicks better. Sometimes people just keep rolling 20s despite the odds. Sometimes they get an advantage/disadvantage to their roll from medicine, genetics, lifestyle, and environment. Sometimes you have every advantage in the world and still roll that 1.
The short answer is that they didn’t. People lived far shorter lifespans in the past – life expectancy of 80+ has only become normal in the last century or so.
You can essentially split medicine into two buckets – before and after germ theory/antibiotics. There isn’t a specific single “antibiotics invented today” date; they were developed over the beginning of the 20th century, with contributions by a handful of different people from different countries at different times.
Before germ theory, things were iffy. Ancient people figured out some things – that rotten teeth needed to be pulled out, that broken bones needed to be bound and set, that food should not be kept near excrement. Wounds were cleaned as best they could be, and often stitched up with needle and thread.
In terms of food and water – making sure food was properly cooked and kept (relatively) clean was figured out at an early stage (since not doing so kills you). Water was iffy, and many cultures invented things like beer and wine, which were safer to drink as the alcohol content killed bacteria.
Infection was utterly deadly, though. Without antibiotics, ancient people had no defence at all against infection, other than food, water and rest.
They got lucky
Some people are genetically less prone to diseases and conditions than others which helps.
Generally speaking though to live that long in the medieval period you would have to have had the benefit of avoiding serious injuries, diseases, had a good and consistent diet, and regular exercise, and a lot of luck.
Lifestyle plays a big factor, but a lot of it was just a roll of the dice.
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.
Let’s say you have a class of 20 people take a quiz.
Let’s say 10 of them get a middle score of 50% right, 5 of them get less than that with 40% right, and the other 5 get more than that with 60% right. In this case it would be correct to say the average score of the class is 50%.
But what if only 2 people got 50% right, while 8 people did really badly with 10% right and the other 8 did really well and got 90% right. In this case it would ALSO be correct to say the average score of the class is 50%.
But those two scenarios look totally different. In the first one, if you hear the average is 50%, and so you picture a typical student getting about 50%, your imagination would be right. But in the second, if you do the same thing an imagine a typical student getting about 50% right, your imagination would be totally off. In the second example the only reason the average is 50% is because lots of people are getting way less than 50% while other people are getting way more than 50%, moving the average to a point in between the people with really bad scores and the people with really good scores even though hardly anyone actually got that average score.
This is kind of what is happening when you hear people cite average life expectancy for midieval populations. If you hear a figure like “31.3 years old” that’s not because it was typical for lots of people to die at 31 years old. It’s because lots of people died young as children while other people lived to old age, and the average lands in between these two sets of people.
Infection was the big killer but even then there were uses for natural compounds with antimicrobial properties.
Other than that childbirth and loss of teeth for eating were big factors in mortality. So an 80-year-old would have been very rare. 40 was considered old age back then.
The vast majority didn’t. That’s the answer. Very few people made it to that age and it was mostly luck. Skill and toughness can get you through a lot, but when 30% of all adults are dying from TB, skill and toughness has nothing to do with that, it’s just a numbers game.
That’s also why the further back in time you go the more value and emphasis is placed on elders. Once upon a time there really was such a thing as “the village elder” that one old guy that is almost 90 and nobody else is even within decades of his age in the whole province. It was rare and special and he saw things with his own eyes that are like ancient legends to most living people.
It is fantastic that human life expectancy has grown so much over the last century and a half or so, but it does mean that elders are more a fact of life now rather than a rare and special thing.
Well they likely were more active, more social, ate less unhealthy foods, and were exposed to fewer carcinogens. So the biggest killers of the elderly today wouldn’t apply to them.
The population of the time was largely rural, so contaminated food and water was less of the threat than you might think. As for the rest, luck would play a role there.
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