What was health like in the 1840's?

Answer 1

It depends upon where in the world you lived. It also depends upon how wealthy you were. For instance, in China and in the Middle East, health care was far more advanced than in Europe. The populations there knew more about disease prevention and hygiene (especially Jews and Arabs, due to ritual bathing and the belief in keeping dwellings clean), than did the wealthiest English people!

Women in the West routinely died in childbirth, not usually because there were complications, but because doctors knew nothing of bacteria and refused to believe early reformers who noticed a link between doctors who has just come from dissecting a rotting corpse to delivering a child. Then they were perplexed when the woman died of "childbed fever", which was really sepsis caused by the bacteria entering the mother's bloodstream from their filthy hands. It was assumed that women were simply "feeble" and "the weaker sex"!

People in the West also did not bathe regularly. They thought it caused diseases like pneumonia and other bronchial ailments. Only when Queen Victoria announced, around 1850, that everyone should bathe, did the practice slowly begin to be adopted, and then only among the upper class.

Food poisoning was rampant, as there was no refrigeration, though in the country, root cellars and the practice of smoking meat often kept food fresh enough to eat. People back then ate things that, today, would send most of us to the emergency room! However, they were riddled with parasites, lived in drafty houses and were infested with fleas that carried other diseases beside Bubonic Plague.

Since antibiotics were unknown, people often died of diseases such as tuberculosis (consumption), diphtheria (often in wells), cholera, typhus and common infections from wounds, all of which are treatable today.

Children were often "farmed out" to relatives until they were seven, so that the parents would not become too attached to them, as the infant and child mortality rate was so high. Little was known about good nutrition, and infants were often weaned on sugar water. Disease caused by poor nutrition, such as rickets, were common.

Sexual health was also terrible. While European explorers inflicted mass death from smallpox and even measles on the Native Americans, they themselves were decimated later, when the syphilis they'd brought BACK infected roughly half the male population of Europe. This may have been the cause of the Victorian woman's famous dislike of sex!

Answer 2

Since it would be considered that to live to up to 50 would be a long life, this indicates that the health in the Victorian time would be very bad and that the doctors wouldn't have been high standard ones that w have today.

So overall, their health were OK, but if some caught a disease, there wouldn't be much chances of living.

Answer 3

i dont know how health is like if u know answer please answer i need the answer

Answer 4

very very very bad babe, there were dieases like urm cholera an stuff an there was no free health service so yeahhh

Answer 5

The health in the Victorian Era was very bad.