I feel like any time I read a wikipedia page about some historical figure born around then they always are described as "sickly" in their childhood. Like fuck, weren't there any health kids back then running around with those hoops and the stick or singing creepy songs in fields and... idk whatever the fuck else kids did back then, commune with black goats who send them on wicked errands to corrupt their soul to the dark prince?

  • blight [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    the working class was starving, and the upper class was doing opium

  • comi [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Lack of vaccines/child labor/malnutrition? Inbreeding in case of royals, who would be healthy there :shrug-outta-hecks:

    • NomadicWarMachine [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Shit, how did we make it to now with everyone dying and miserable?

      • SaniFlush [any, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It was mostly densely populated cities which had plague problems

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Shit, how did we make it to now with everyone dying and miserable?

        no evidence that those people actually did "make it to now", tbh. I'm sure many did, but I'm also sure that if you were to do a full geneological analysis, that many of those people died without reproducing, similar to the neolithic genetic bottleneck

  • steve5487 [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    there was a real issue of companies taking poor children from the workhouse as unpaid apprentices and then not feeding them and working them to death then burying them in mass graves. In the UK at the time. Basically the industrial revolution in England was incredibly evil and the worst time to be a kid

    • Tofu_Lewis [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Dickens does a great job of portraying this - most of fucked up shit that he describes was just commonplace observation in Victorian London. Also, his article on the sheer amount of horse shit that was sitting on the streets all the time is mind-boggling: a big reason the aristocracy retreated to the country every summer is because the horse shit would turn to dust and you'd be breathing horse shit dust everywhere you went.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    my guess is that most historical figures that we have records of were complete nerds and grew up in relative privilege

    sickly kids were probably everywhere since that could mean anything, but a lot of kids died, but the ones who survived and weren't subject to field labor got to end up historical figures

    Marx was a sickly child and sickly adult who had horrifying boils all over his skin

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
    ·
    3 years ago

    i mean sickly was a general name for literally thousands of different ailments we have names for now. loads of diseases vaccined and curtailed thru sanitation now,

    the long term adverse effects from contracting them... like long covid but a dozen poorly understood diseases with barely any remediation.