When I was young my grandfather got me a book that I admittedly only skimmed/rushed through, but I found a copy and there are some remarkable excerpts that illustrate nicely how bleak life used to be, and how much progress we've made thanks to technology, social change, and science.
These examples are about France during the end of the 19th century:
- In 1880 some regions had barely one doctor per 5,000 people, and dental work was the blacksmith's job. One man in four and one woman in five was widowed before 35 and aout 10% of women who gave birth died during or just after it.
- 90% mortality rate for children sent out to nurse at the end of the Ancien Régime. At the end of the Ancien Régime, 4,000 to 7,000 infants were abandoned in Paris every year.
- Military conscription records from 1872 show roughly a third of young men had serious physical defects: 5% were under 1.45m, 9% were tubercular or rickety, others were lame, herniated, hunchbacked, club-footed, deaf, or toothless.
- People simply threw waste and excrement out the window. Butchers flooded the streets with blood, tanners with stench; one writer said Rouen could be smelled from half a league away.
