This is what the world was like before childhood vaccinations.

[Bleacher Creature]

Link to tweet

[MustLoveBeagles]

1. K&R

[tblue37]

2. K&R for visibility. nt

[SheltieLover]

3. True story, BC!

[Rhiannon12866]

4. I visited the family plot at the cemetery with my grandmother and saw all the tiny stones

Her grandmother gave birth to 14 children, but only 6 lived to grow up.

[wnylib]

5. My maternal grandmother

gave birth to 8 children and 7 lived to grow up. My mother almost didn't make it since she was a slightly less than 7 months preemie. (Her mother died a few hours later.)

My paternal great-grandmother gave birth to 10 children. 8 survived.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. My grandmother only had one brother, but their mother died when they were 13 and 8 in 1913

So my grandmother spent a lot of time with her paternal grandmother and her job was trimming the grass at their cemetery plot, so she took me there to see it. I still remember all the names, not one of the girls survived, but the one that got to me the most were the twins, Robert and LeRoy. They share the same stone.

[wnylib]

9. My maternal great-grandmother had 10 children,

the first 8 born in Germany and the last two in America, which she proudly noted in her Bible. (Karl and Minnie sind in Amerika geboren.)

She died young, when her last child was just a toddler. The oldest girl was 13 and took over her mother's duties and responsibilities in the household. Times were rough back then.

My paternal grandmother had 9 children. All but the last one were born at home on a farm with a midwife attending. All of them lived. No miscarriages, either.

So I had oodles of aunts, uncles, great aunts and great uncles, first and second cousins. We could have started our own village. Combined family events, like weddings, required a LOT of space.

[3catwoman3]

6. Walk thru any old cemetery from that time and...

…you will see many family site with half a dozen or more tiny headstones. People did not expect that all their children would live.

[SergeStorms]

8. Many children died of cholera....

pneumonia, dysentery, measles....any number of diseases that ran rampant before modern sewage treatment and storm drains.

I used to be the genealogist for Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY. That's where Frederick Douglass is buried, along with Susan B. Anthony and many other late 19th century and early 20th century notables.

I was always amazed at the number of young children that never made it past 5 years. The number of mothers that died during childbirth as well. So sad. Life was excruciatingly difficult back then. 😪

[Nay]

10. Yellow fever, too. My mother had 8 siblings in the 1920's -- yellow fever killed all but 3 within

the space of about a month. I have no idea how you'd survive the deaths of 6 children at once.

[SergeStorms]

12. I guess that's why they had so many kids.

At least they'd get a few that lived until adulthood.

The poor women were treated as nothing less than brood mares, pumping out children one after another. They often died during childbirth, but the man would find another woman to tend to his children and pump a few more out.

This "birth of a nation" crap was built atop the bodies of millions of women and children. 😢.

[Emile]

11. I can't imagine losing five children, wow!

[Phoenix61]

13. The average life expectancy hasn't changed much

Prior to vaccines and antibiotics if you made it past the age of 5 odds were good you’d make it to sixty.

[NickB79]

14. Lots of pioneer graveyards in the Upper Midwest

There was one near our farm in Minnesota. Lots of children buried there. Even as a teenager I noticed that, and figured out the root cause from simple logic.

Life has as HARD before modern medicine and science. People would be wise to remember that.