What would have killed you?

Xcom2 · 19-04-2005 11:42PM

Yikes! :eek:

I've never had a broken bone or a major illness in my life.

I'm not normal am I?(can see myself spending more time in PI).

Get my couch ready Beruthiel I'm coming in heavy!

X

smileygal · 19-04-2005 11:42PM

Comnbination of Tonsilitis/some other fever & the damp Irish weather without electricity or central heating

Kernel · 19-04-2005 11:49PM

Xcom2 wrote:

Yikes! :eek:

I've never had a broken bone or a major illness in my life.

I'm not normal am I?(can see myself spending more time in PI).

Get my couch ready Beruthiel I'm coming in heavy!

X

She'd just ban you for breaking the medical advice charter!

Pyr0 · 19-04-2005 11:59PM

DublinWriter wrote:

Ah yes, but invert the arguement! At least people in the middle ages didn't get to die from car-accidents, AIDS, 'Friendly' Fire, MSRA and a 5 day wait in the Matter.

Aye you could be killed by Friendly fire,you know Medievil battles could be very confusing

nesf · 20-04-2005 12:03AM

Spent the first two weeks of my life in an incubator, so that probably would be me dying after my birth.

If I survived that, 2 bout of the whooping cough while I was very young (5 or so) would probably have done for me. There were a few necessary operations in my 10th year that would have made life really nasty if they weren't carried out.

And then that combined pneumonia in one lung and pleuresy in the other lung at the same time that I picked up at age 19 would definitely have killed me, I barely survived it with modern medical care!

Those were the major things, other things like asthma were also present in my life but they weren't life threatening at any point.

the_syco · 20-04-2005 12:12AM

Hmmm... a car hit me, and put me into a coma for 3 days, when I was about 12. Without modern medicine, I'd be dead, but in the middle ages, there'd be no cars... :rolleyes:

Infini · 20-04-2005 12:16AM

Be alive and healthy but would probably be half-way to Japan by now!

the_syco · 20-04-2005 12:20AM

DublinWriter wrote:

Ah yes, but invert the arguement! At least people in the middle ages didn't get to die from car-accidents, AIDS, 'Friendly' Fire, MSRA and a 5 day wait in the Matter.

If a horse ran you over, you'd be fecked. No ambulance.

AIDS... maybe not, but there's alot of other nasty sh|t out there.

'Friendly' Fire... it wouldn't be an accident. And they'd finish you off!

theCzar · 20-04-2005 09:42AM

doggiepaw wrote:

I used to work in superquinn as a lil un, at the end of the day we had to get all those bins you see round the shops and empty them into a big ass compressor in the back of a shop, it was like the back of a binlorry, huge big jaws squashing rubbish, grabbed a bin one day and went to empty it in, the metal bin inside the plastic fell into the compressor so i hops in to fish it out, someone comes in, fecks a big black bag in ontop of me and turns the compressor on, that nearly killed me, gave me a sore throat from all the screaming anyway

yikes! :eek:

no trash compactors in the middle ages, they just fling it on the street in order to promote disease, which kills you!

Wibbs · 20-04-2005 01:05PM

I've made it to the grand old age of 37 without any medical intervention to speak of. I've never had an antibiotic and the only vaccination I've had is for polio when I was a kid. I'm lucky though as my family are very long lived so maybe that's part of it.

I'm quite surprised at the amount of things like asthma that people here have gone through. I would say that in my age group(among my friends, etc.), it seems to be quite rare. Especially the more life threatening condition described by some. I only know one girl with hay fever and it's of the very mild kind.

Shyster · 20-04-2005 01:10PM

Asthma is more common in children now than it was in children say 30 years ago, its a thing you grow out of usually so it would be more common in young people. Im sure theres a medical way of saying all that...?!

Gurgle · 20-04-2005 01:16PM

Another genetically programmed survivor here.

Actually, I'd have much fewer scars, as they didn't have motorbikes, barbed wire, mountain bikes, or swiss army knives back then.

On the other hand, I probably would have been swinging from the gallows at an early age.

WizZard · 20-04-2005 01:23PM

I'd still be alive...

Dr. Loon · 20-04-2005 01:23PM

I'd be grand, although I'd probably have had a limb lopped off, as I stole things when I was a kid. Or, if sleeping pills existed then, I'd be dead, as I ate quite a large amount when I was young.

*Sassy* · 20-04-2005 01:34PM

Great thread!

It's so strange to think about this. A huge amount of people would never have reached puberty, and those who did were more likely to die in their 20s. The oldest people must have been in their 40s!

I probably would have died when I was born, was in an incubator for 6 or 8 weeks, can't remember. Had the usual ailments as a kid, chicken pox, mumps etc. The flu would probably have killed a lot of people. If I managed to survive all that I mostly likely would have been killed while rambling into the pen of a mad goat or something cos I am as blind as a bat (well, before my laser eye surgery I was!).

BrokenArrows · 20-04-2005 01:35PM

ah ive had no need for medical science in my life-time thankfully. But probably would have been killed in a duel defending my honour etc. LOL.

Well if any of us lived in the 1300's 1 in 3 of us would die from the black death.

seamus · 20-04-2005 01:39PM

Meningitis would have gotten me, aged two. If not, I'd still be kicking.

theCzar · 20-04-2005 01:50PM

*Sassy* wrote:

Great thread!

aw shucks

BrokenArrows wrote:

Well if any of us lived in the 1300's 1 in 3 of us would die from the black death.

what if it had killed the 1/3 of people that would have survived the surprisingly vast array of illnessess posted here... and there'd be nobody left. except for Charlton Heston, he's a survivor

pickarooney · 20-04-2005 02:27PM

Pneumonia would have done for me for sure, if measles hadn't got me first. Or famine, I was a very picky eater.

Lump · 20-04-2005 02:58PM

I'd have died from the 6 hour coma I was in when I was 14... or 15.

John

Tha Gopher · 20-04-2005 04:22PM

tSubh Dearg wrote:

I wouldn't exist and neither would my mother. She would've died in childbirth as i was a cesarean section baby.

Aye me too, i was more than 9 pounds, nearly 10

Mind you, who knows what woulda happened, i was cut out as much because of my own laziness in not moving as anything (over 2 weeks overdue)

Also, if this was the 15th century, i would have died for lack of modern technology when I was 15 and took 3 bullets from an uzi in a drive by. If that incient had happened in 1498 id be brown bread right now.....

Canis Lupus · 20-04-2005 04:42PM

I'd be shortsighted.

Wibbs · 20-04-2005 09:19PM

*Sassy* wrote:

Great thread!

It's so strange to think about this. A huge amount of people would never have reached puberty, and those who did were more likely to die in their 20s. The oldest people must have been in their 40s!

Agree with you there on the great thread.

I would suspect that social class back then would determine your longevity(sadly still the case). The higher up the longer you lived. If you look back through history there where lots of old people knockin around. I seem to remember the bible gave the average span as 3 score and ten(70). Which is pretty close to today. Even then many famous people lived to and beyond that mark, Rameses the great died at 92, Newton, Michaelangelo and Titian died in their late 80s. There are many more examples.

I was reading a while back that it's considered that the average age of death of the people who built Newgrange was late 30s and it got me to thinking. I seriously suspect this idea's wrong. It tends to be accepted too easily IMHO.

Before modern medicine if you survived childhood the chances were pretty good that you would get to 60/70. There are a good few examples of tribal and isolated human settlements reaching old age(some very old). People living in hunter gatherer societies tend to have very good diets and take loads of exercise. They also tend to have close familial ties and be more spiritual than "modern" people. All attributes that make living a long healthy life more likely.

It is a bit scary nowadays to see so many younger people with fairly serious(some life threatening) allergies. I was talking to a bloke a bit older than me recently who is a teacher. He was telling me that in the years since he started the prevelance of asthma and excema(sp?) has grown at a crazy rate.

Of all my classmates at school there was only one of them with asthma. The poor bugger used to get teased a lot after he had an attack(he's a mate of mine and still a little asthmatic). Nowadays half the class would be wheezing along with him.

This is all the more puzzling given that nowadays the air is generally considered cleaner. People burn smokeless fuel, our cars have catalytic converters and you can't even spark up a ciggie in a pub anymore. Even our food and drink is monitored to a much higher extent than in the past. With all that one would think the incidence would be dropping.

Zaph · 20-04-2005 10:50PM

Ironically the general "cleanliness" of our environment is often blamed for the increase in childhood asthma. Many argue that children are being brought up in antiseptically clean, central-heated homes and that this doesn't give them a chance to build up an immunity to many of the things these kids are allergic to. Most do seem to grow out of it in their early teens. When I was a kid I there was only one other kid in my class with asthma. Don't know if his ever went away but I've still got mine nearly 35 years later

DrIndy · 20-04-2005 11:26PM

Asthma, like heart disease and diabetes are diseases of the developed world and hardly existed in the middle ages.

So all asthmatics would not be in the middle ages.......

abccormac · 20-04-2005 11:37PM

asthma, pneumonia, measles, chest infections, flu, kidney infection, ingrown toenails, the lot!

Capt'n Midnight · 21-04-2005 12:22AM

Would have signed out as an infant - jaundice
if I hadn't been born in europe back then it would have been measles at 10

Gurgle · 21-04-2005 09:02AM

DrIndy wrote:

Asthma, like heart disease and diabetes are diseases of the developed world and hardly existed in the middle ages.

Total myth.
They just couldn't be diagnosed or treated until relatively recently.

daithimac · 21-04-2005 09:39AM

i was run over by a truck as a kid which nearly killed me but there were no trucks in the middle ages so drat my timing

MorningStar · 21-04-2005 09:41AM

Appendix, car, van, truck, water (nearly drowned twice) and the number one has to be the ground.

What would have killed you?

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