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What were the common causes of death during the middle ages?

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What were the common causes of death during the middle ages?

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First of all, the infant mortality rate was enormous. Giving birth killed lots of women. People had no way to cope with cleft palates or other birth defects, peasant children were born into filthy environments, and measles, scabies, typhus, dysentery, mumps, scarlet fever and pneumonia were rampant. Every four or five years or so there was a bad harvest, which killed many children under the age of 5 due to malnutrition. Tuberculosis was also rampant, and many 20 year olds never saw 30 because of this very common disease. The single greatest cause of suicide in the Middle Ages was toothache. The entire era was very violent with many local lords engaging in private warfare with each other. Hardly anyone knew how to swim and so deaths by drowning were also very common. During this era you were very lucky to hit 45.

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There were many diseases then that there was no cure for, like smallpox, polio, diptheria, tuberculosis, malaria,scarlet fever etc, and people of all ages succumbed to them. Smallpox continued to be a dreaded disease up until the beginning of innoculation against smallpox in the 18th century, though the other diseases continued to be common causes of death until the twentieth century. A common cause of death among women was death from the dreaded childbed fever, which carried off many women, about 10% of women who gave birth I believe. This continued to be a major hazard for women until the invention of antiseptics in the 19th century. it is only really in the last hundred years or so that death among young people has become a rarity, and most people can reasonably expect to live to old age. However, even in medieval times some people did live to a ripe old age, Eleanor of Aquitaine lived to be over eighty for instance.

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