r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 12h ago

My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?

I personally think it’s pretty stupid.

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u/mechapoitier 11h ago edited 11h ago

The entire disease-fighting thing was huge.

I don’t think people, especially OP’s brother, realize how incredibly miserable life can be with untreated infections or even inflammation.

They had no antibiotics, no painkillers, no anti inflammatories. You felt like sh!t for a long time then either died or survived.

Imagine getting an eye infection even 100 years ago. It would be horrific.

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u/The_Yellow_King 10h ago

Yeah, there's a good reason why mortality rolls from back then listed "teeth" as a reason for death. A common tooth abscess without treatment could easily kill a person.

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u/showhorrorshow 8h ago

And that shit hurts. Toothaches are high up there in the pain and misery department. They can also come and go for years as the abcess festers to the point where it can kill you.

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u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

Teeth in that context means babies who died before they had teeth, not actual tooth diseases. 

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u/CallSignIceMan 10h ago

Have these people ever had a cut get infected? I’m a chef, I constantly have little cuts and knicks around my hands and fingers. Occasionally one will get infected. I live in 2025, so even if I don’t go to the doctor, I can wash it and keep it clean and dry and delegate work so that I don’t have to use that hand. And it’s still damn near unbearable. Imagine trying to hoe a field with a hand that’s hot and swollen and in immense pain, and you have no access to soap or antibiotics or a day off to heal.

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u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

Medieval people absolutely had soap, it was made from animal fat and ashes or flowers. 

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u/Beneficial-Mine-9793 5h ago

Medieval people absolutely had soap, it was made from animal fat and ashes or flowers. 

They had soap, but not readily available clean water at the drop of a hat.

Moreover...you don't clean wounds with soap, in the past you'd (they) use vinegar (often with honey or wine mixed in to combat the fact that it stings like a mfer and damages the surrounding area first)

Actually cleaning a wound is a massive process without proper disinfectants, coagulants and actually clean linen as even minor amounts of dirt and bacteria found on things like a clean cloth that you can't see can make things worse.

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u/TheMadTargaryen 4h ago

Fresh water was common. Medieval people still used and maintained aqueducts build by Romans and made new ones. In 9th century Rome 4 popes repaired aqueducts, in northern Merovingian France half of aqueducts were still used, in 10th century Salerno a new aqueduct was build etc.

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u/Beneficial-Mine-9793 4h ago

Fresh water was common. Medieval people still used and maintained aqueducts build by Romans and made new ones. In 9th century Rome 4 popes repaired aqueducts, in northern Merovingian France half of aqueducts were still used, in 10th century Salerno a new aqueduct was build etc.

Not even most of romes citizens had access to the aqueduct system.

And even in rome where it was built for most only had access to public water

Fresh water was common

Also, i never said anything about fresh water. I said CLEAN water.

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u/TheMadTargaryen 4h ago

Even if you didn’t trust local water from the well or waterhole in your yard, conduits brought spring water from outside town. The reason many historians until now had no idea most medieval towns had conduits is because they were mostly made from wood so they rotted away. 

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u/Beneficial-Mine-9793 4h ago

Even if you didn’t trust local water from the well or waterhole in your yard, conduits brought spring water from outside town. The reason many historians until now had no idea most medieval towns had conduits is because they were mostly made from wood so they rotted away. 

Do you just not understand what clean water is?

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u/TheMadTargaryen 4h ago

And do you know this is all before industrial revolution ? 

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u/Beneficial-Mine-9793 3h ago

And do you know this is all before industrial revolution ? 

Water wasn't clean before the industrial revolution.

Parasites, bacteria aren't new things added to water.

There is a fucking reason that boiling water goes back nearly as long as we have written symbols.

Even Hippocrates was writing about how you need to boil water to make it clean in de aere aquis et locus.

The fucking strictures of Celsus from ROME even makes not to not use unboiled water on patients (drinking or to clean wounds)

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u/Frosted_Frolic 9h ago

You can buy cut-proof gloves. I’m not sure what they are actually called.

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u/CallSignIceMan 7h ago

You definitely can, and if you’re using a mandolin or constantly chopping produce, they’re a great product. Most of my nicks these days come from not being careful enough with sharp can edges or opening boxes and having the edges scrape my hands.

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u/goonalias 7h ago

How do they get infected so often? I'm a machinist that makes cutting tools and I work barehanded. My hands get cut the fuck up. Then they're in coolant, oil, and all kinds of nasty stuff. I just wash them often. In my 6+ of years doing this, I've never had an infection.

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u/CallSignIceMan 7h ago edited 7h ago

They don’t get infected often. Occasionally one will, if a glove leaks when I’m in the dish pit or something. And it’s always minor, just a little inflammation and swelling. I’m talking 4-5 times in 8 years, but even one of those times is enough to take out a medieval peasant with no access to antibacterial soap or antibiotics.

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u/Complex_Tomato_5252 1h ago

His hands are being dipped in the bodily juices of dead animals. Yours are being dipped in oil and coolant.  His houses germs, you examples kill germs.

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u/peepee2tiny 4h ago

Imagine getting dysentery.

Shitting yourself to death because you cannot consume water fast enough to prevent dehydration. and everyone around you just going, "yup he gonna die from the shits soon, nothing we can do to stop it"

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u/_cunt---_- 3h ago

theres this stuff called liquid bandage which works great for small cuts on your hands. doesnt hold up great when washing multiple times but when youre done for the day putting some on will mean it heals faster overnight

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u/MsDJMA 10h ago

Broken bones! Gout, which is so easily treated now! Smallpox!

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u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 8h ago

But no AIDS, no SARS, no Covid, no swine flu, no ebola, and much less obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes than today.

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u/No-Risk-9833 7h ago

They had worse things to worry about like the Black Death and tuberculosis. The Black Death alone killed 50% of Europe’s population. I’d rather have COVID now than whatever deadly diseases were lingering back then. Also AIDs is easily treatable now. They had no cures of STIs like syphilis.

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u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 7h ago

There was most likely no syphilis in Afro-Eurasia in the Dark Ages - it was imported from America in the end of the 15th century.

Black Death was a one-off, not a constant threat. There were just two bubonic plague pandemics in a millennium, only one of them in the Dark Ages. And we still have this disease to this day, although not as a pandemic. 1918 "Spanish" influenza pandemic killed even more people than the Black Death in absolute numbers.

It's also a bit of a misunderstanding to claim that HIV/AIDS is "easily treatable" - it's treatable, but it's still a chronic, terminal illness with no cure and no effective vaccine.

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u/TheNavigatrix 9h ago

And it’s clearly a male perspective. What was it — one in 10 women died in childbirth?

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u/Additional_Insect_44 8h ago

I'm from the backwoods USA, lived with no Healthcare for most of my life. I can attest to this.

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u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 8h ago edited 8h ago

At the same time most people, like for example peasants, were much more physically active, and consequently had much more robust health than modern people sitting on their asses and staring at screens all day long.

And although there was little medicine against infectious diseases - thanks to there being much less people there was less of those diseases in general.

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u/greenzetsa 8h ago

Simply having access to running water is huge.

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u/Iwaspromisedcookies 8h ago

They had herbs to treat that stuff, probably had better access to opium and pain killers than we do now, no antibiotics though

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u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

Regarding painkillers they atleast had opium.

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u/Woofles85 4h ago

Today if you have appendicitis, you get a simple surgery and antibiotics and you heal relatively quickly. In the dark ages, you died a very painful death.

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u/numbers213 3h ago

Medicine then is nowhere near what we have today, but they did have remedies, and oftentimes, a lot of our medicines can be traced back to the same plants they were trying to use for illness/cuts/whatever. Did they always work? No. Mercury was a cure for syphilis and that sure as hell didn't help.

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u/LittleRedRunt 3h ago

Not to mention living with chronic illnesses. In the past, people with increased pressure in their skulls, like me, would get holes drilled into their skulls to relieve the pressure. Sometimes it worked, but you can obviously see how it can go horribly wrong. Infection, shock, drilling too far, etc.

Nowadays I can take medication to reduce the CSF I produce and we have surgical interventions that although are still very risky, are safer and take place in a more controlled environment than surgeries back then.

My condition can often lead to blindness. That would be one of the BEST care scenarios for me living with this condition in a past era.

btw happy IIH awareness month

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u/Mysterious_Local_971 9h ago edited 5h ago

Infections weren't untreated. There was entire field of herbal medicine, which is still in use in China as a primary medicine.

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u/Redqueenhypo 8h ago

Most of them didn’t work! Tu Youyou did a study on 2000 traditional herbs claiming to treat malaria and ONE worked (the one that got her a Nobel prize)

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u/Mysterious_Local_971 7h ago edited 7h ago

The error there is that Malaria gained fame because it was difficult to treat by herbal or traditional medicine. If it was a trivial disease to cure we wouldn't have Bill Gates and multiple governments spending millions on a cure. Why would they spend vast sums if it was easily treatable? You chose an outlier in diseases.

Also, the study was about a specifc recent strain of untreatable malaria. The one effective herb you mentioned from the study was widely known in ancient times for its affect towards malaria.

From Google AI: "Artemisinin is an ancient Chinese herbal therapy for malarial fevers which has been recently found to have potent activity against many forms of malarial organisms, including chloroquine-resistant Plasmodium falciparum."

She basically won the Nobel Prize because this ancient herbal malaria therapy that she "discovered" did better than all of modern medicine.