What is something that a person died of 50 years ago, that wouldn't kill them today because of modern medicine?
I am the oldest of 3 girls. After they had me, my mother had another full term pregnancy, but the baby was still born. The cord was wrapped around her neck. I’m pretty sure that today they would catch that in time to save the baby.
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Asthma. Several of the kids I was in hospital with about five decade ago died of asthma within a few years. Allergies/allergic reactions. Ditto.
Many cancers are much more treatable/manageable than they were 5/10/20/50 years ago.
Nobody on Earth has smallpox today. 50 years ago it was killing millions every year.
The first two words of the Wikipedia page are really stunning – “smallpox was”.
50 years ago was 1967.
Postpartum hemorrhage.
Measles, mumps, chicken pox
Asthma
Scarlet fever
Tetanus
Crohn’s almost certainly would have killed me by now if I’d been a patient 50 years ago instead of today. The surgical procedure I got didn’t even exist until the 1980’s, though there is an alternative surgery I could have gotten that has been around since the 1950’s. Many of the medications I have been on are modern biologics. Without the medical or surgical options I’ve had available to me, I would not achieve remission, and a prolonged flare would probably kill me within a year. Even with those options available, I’ve still been sick enough to need a lot of blood transfusions, which, looking it up now, have been available since about the 1940’s, and as recently as the 1980’s, getting AIDS from a blood transfusion was still a huge risk.
Yay for modern medicine.
Gosh, without modern medicine I’d be crippled, my teeth would be hugely messed up, I would be blind, and it would probably be assumed I was mentally defective.
Heart disease, high blood pressure, gonorrhea, pneumonia, many blood disorders.
If you consider 100 years back Plague was a deadly killer.
Stroke.
My grandfather died of a stroke in 1950, my grandmother died of one in 1974. My mother had a massive stroke in 1999, but through quick intervention and modern occupational therapy, she is still alive and doing well for being 93 yrs old.
Edited, because AIDS has already been mentioned.
The US loses wars but individual soldiers survive injuries that would have killed them 50 years ago.
I’d go with influenza and small pox. Among others mentioned above. My dad had had Scarlet Fever when he was a child, and almost died. In which case, obviously, I would not be sitting here typing this. And my grandfather survived the Western Front trench fighting of WW I, only to lose friends and fellow soldiers to the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918. Now I think on it, our modern world isn’t really all that bad.
And people are fools not to vaccinate their children.
@Dutchess_III Agreed, I’ve never understood the anti vaccine movement. Those people are putting everyone’s health in jeopardy.
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