Let’s assume that this is a question written in good faith and that the querant really doesn’t know the answer.
I’ve written about this before, but throughout the 18th and 19th century when they started recording these things, two thirds of babies born on the island of St Kilda off the North West coast of Scotland, died within two weeks of being born, from neonatal tetanus.
Strangely enough, no adult, despite working on the land barefoot as well as working with farm animals, was ever recorded as dying from tetanus.
Why do you think that is?
I’ll give you a hint. Those who survived neonatal tetanus, had a degree of immunity to tetanus as adults. It’s just a shame that two thirds of babies born there had to die in order to confer that immunity.
Back in the day, those people who survived all of the potentially fatal diseases going around as children, carried on some immunity to them as adults.
So yeah, adults back then were more immune to a bunch of stuff without being vaccinated. But that’s only because they were immunised by surviving the diseases in childhood.
Shame that the majority died before reaching adulthood.
I am 53, and from a generation that received relatively few vaccinations.
I did, however, receive the BCG vaccination against tuberculosis. This vaccine is no longer given routinely in the Western world, because TB has almost been wiped out in the West (proof, if you think, that vaccines are not handed out like M&Ms).
However, a few miles from where I grew up, you’ll find this:
A collection of houses and cottages, probably big enough at the time to be called a hamlet.
8 families, 3 or 4 generations.
Every one dead, to the last member.
Tuberculosis.
These properties are still standing because there is no heir.
NO ONE SURVIVED.
There are, of course, some dipshits who would just go to the next house along the road, and say “Look, here’s a family that survived TB! Therefore people in the past had stronger immune systems.” Because those who died, those whose health was permanently destroyed, aren’t around for these dipshits to point at.
A vaccination I did not get was the infamous MMR.
Instead, I got the measles, like everyone did back then.
And like a significant number of people who got the measles, including my mother and a great-aunt, it damaged my eyesight. Fortunately, I did not get rheumatic fever, like my uncle; or die, like a great-uncle and many of his little friends in the epidemic that left his sister blind (yes, the great-aunt I just mentioned).
People in the past did NOT have good immune systems.
They DIED. In droves, in millions.
You just know nothing about them, because they’re dead.
People used to die of disease a lot more often in the past.
Here is a graph showing the cause of death, by percentage, for the last 160 years or so in the state of Massachusetts.
As you can see in the 1800s between 50% and 60% of all deaths were caused by infectious disease. Around the 1870s this number begins to go down, which is roughly when we moved from inoculation to vaccination. As more vaccines are developed and as they become cheaper and more widely available, the number continues to plummet, reaching its nadir in the 1950s.
The one exception being the 1918s, and the Spanish Flu epidemic, for which there was no vaccine.
Following the 1950s the number slowly trends upwards. This is right around the time the anti-vax movement came into existence. Something only possible in a world where infectious disease was no longer an omnipresent concern.
The graph of life expectancy in the US follows the opposite trend. In the 1900s it’s about 50. It took a sharp dip during the Spanish Flu Pandemic. And it currently sits at 73 for women and 68 for men, an all time high.
This means that we can ignore the increase in death from Heart Disease and Cancer in the first graph. Not because we don’t have a problem with either, we do. But because to a large extent they simply represent that without infectious disease to kill us, something else has to take its place. Living longer doesn’t mean you’re immortal.
