At Home - Bill Bryson [219]
A woman giving birth in the eighteenth century (note the way modesty is preserved by the sheet pulled around the doctor’s neck) (photo credit 18.1)
For children, birth was just the beginning. The first years of life weren’t so much a time of adventure as of misadventure, it seems. In addition to the endless waves of illness and epidemic that punctuated every existence, accidental death was far more common—breathtakingly so, in fact. Coroners’ rolls for London in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries include such abrupt childhood terminations as “drowned in a pit,” “bitten by sow,” “fell into pan of hot water,” “hit by cart-wheel,” “fell into tin of hot mash,” and “trampled in crowd.” The historian Emily Cockayne relates the sad case of a little boy who lay down in the road and covered himself with straw to amuse his friends. A passing cart squashed him.
Ariès and his adherents took such deaths as proof of parental carelessness and lack of interest in children’s well-being, but this is to impose modern standards on historic behavior. A more generous reading would bear in mind that every waking moment of a medieval mother’s life was full of distractions. She might have been nursing a sick or dying child, fighting off a fever herself, struggling to start a fire (or put one out), or doing any of a thousand other things. If children aren’t bitten by sows today, it is not because they are better supervised. It is because we don’t keep sows in the kitchen.
A good many modern conclusions are based on mortality rates from the past that are not actually all that certain. The first person to look carefully into the matter was, a little unexpectedly, the astronomer Edmond Halley, who is of course principally remembered now for the comet named for him. A tireless investigator into scientific phenomena of all kinds, Halley produced papers on everything from magnetism to the soporific effects of opium. In 1693, he came across figures for annual births and deaths in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland), which fascinated him because they were so unusually complete. He realized that from them he could construct charts from which it was possible to work out the life expectancy of any person at any point in his existence. He could say that for someone aged twenty-five the chances of dying in the next year were 80 to 1 against, that someone who reached thirty could reasonably expect to live another twenty-seven years, that the chances of a man of forty living another seven years were 5 ½ to 1 in favor, and so on. These were the first actuarial tables, and, apart from anything else, they made the life insurance industry possible.
Halley’s findings were reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a scientific journal, and for that reason seem to have escaped the full attention of social historians, which is unfortunate because there is much of interest in them. Halley’s figures showed, for instance, that Breslau contained seven thousand women of child-bearing age yet only twelve hundred gave birth each year—“little more than a sixth part,” as he noted. Clearly the great majority of women at any time were taking careful steps to avoid pregnancy. So childbirth, in Breslau anyway, wasn’t some inescapable burden to which women had to submit, but a largely voluntary act.
Halley’s figures also showed that infant mortality was not quite as bad as the figures now generally cited would encourage us to suppose. In Breslau, slightly over a quarter of babies died in their first year, and 44 percent were dead by their seventh birthday. These are bad numbers, to be sure, but appreciably better than the comparable figures of one-third and one-half usually cited. Not until seventeen