Oops, sorry!
Nurse is the important part anyway!
I’ve mentioned before…my great-grandmother had seven children. Only two survived to adolescence (not even adulthood!).
So one of your ancestors died as an adolescent? That’s wild.
Given the prevalence of teen marriage and childbirth through history, not that wild
It’s one thing to have a kid while being a teenager, but then dying before adulthood. I can’t imagine being that person who grows up knowing that at least one of their parents never reached adulthood themselves.
I assume they were raised by other family, but still. It would also mean you probably would have little or no real memory of that parent, because they couldn’t have been alive for too long after you were born, and then any pictures you might have of them to know them by would be child photos.
Seems like a real mindfuck. I wonder if it’s one of those situations where you are raised by a grandparent, who tells you they’re your parent, and you are told your actual parent was an older sibling. I’ve heard of stories like that.
I’m guessing it was probably the grandmother. Childbirth still isn’t a particular safe thing, even with modern medicine.
Old cemetaries are filled not only with children who died from now-preventable disease but often children birthing other children. We just don’t talk about it very much, probably to our discredit. It was a heck of a lot more common than we would otherwise think.
Maybe I’m getting whooshed, but I assume “only two survived to adolescence (not even adulthood!)” means five died before adolescence and the remaining two, one of which was carrps’ grandmother, survived to adulthood. “Not even adulthood” is emphasizing that the five died very early, not that the remaining two didn’t make it to adulthood.
The scary thing is that either reading is entirely reasonable, given what we know from history - even comparatively recent history
That makes no sense. If you “only survived to adolescence”, that means you made it to adolescence and died. Especially when you add “not even adulthood”. Your interpretation does not seem valid given what was written. It clearly states nobody but two made it to adolescence, and those didn’t even make it to adulthood.
I mean, you literally would have to completely ignore the “not even adulthood”… What does that part even mean in your opinion?
Now, if it was written this way:
Only two survived to adulthood (not even adolescence!).
Then your interpretation is valid. The “not even adolescence” part would mean that those who didn’t survive to adulthood didn’t even make it to adolescence. Is it possible that you transposed those words while you read it? (If so, I would understand your interpretation.)
IMO, “not even adulthood” was intended as an intensifier for “adolescence”. It was not referring to how far the two survivors made it. Note that “only survived to adolescence” was not the wording used.
I’m not arguing that it’s the clearest way to write it. I’m just guessing what was intended. @carrps would have to confirm, though.
You got it right. Sorry for the confusion.
No, that is exactly the wording used, this is a quote.
Ah, so you meant it the other way around (as I said here):
Only two survived to adulthood (not even adolescence!).
Thanks for clarifying.
What I was ineptly trying to say was that the two who survived made it as far as adolescence (and beyond i.e. to adulthood). The other five died very young.
Prescriptivist! 
/s
But more seriously, putting my copy edit hat on, probably better to have put it “survived to adolescence, much less adulthood”
Since this is the Pit and we love a hijack, it is not exactly the wording. “Two only survived to adolescence” has a different meaning from “only two survived to adolescence.”
Way back when, I wrote a software dev book, and the editor drilled into me the proper placement of “only”. I simultaneously enjoy the evolution of language and grammar, yet still get twitchy when “only” is not placed before the word it is intended to modify.
Yes, you are correct that it would have been better to just move the word “only” in the original quote, so that it says:
Two only survived to adolescence (not even adulthood!).
Because just as you stated, where the word “only” was placed meant it was modifying the word “two” rather than the word “adolescence”, which completely changed the whole meaning of the sentence.
And since the 00s, the smallpox vaccine has been given to some U.S. soldiers deemed high-risk. My friend’s husband was one of those, and he had to quarantine for 28 days afterwards.
I have never believed that these repositories are the only ones in the world, especially after this story broke.
And this follow-up, three days later.
AAAAAND this story, a decade earlier. As a library volunteer, I definitely shared it with my colleagues, who thankfully all said they’d never found anything quite like this.
Wait, how did that story post twice? You can edit it if you wish.
This 2014 article discusses the unearthing of relics and corpses believed to have been infected by smallpox, and reviews attempts to isolate live smallpox virus from them.
In most of these cases, documented live virus survival was on the order of days to months; one outlier study of dried crusts kept in an envelope at room temperature reported viable virus recovered up to 13 years after testing began.
No live virus was found in the sample discovered in a book in New Mexico.
If there’s anything semi-realistic to be concerned about in regards to old relics/archeological finds, I’d think that bodies of smallpox victims unearthed from permafrost are the most likely to potentially harbor viable smallpox virus.
*envisioning a scenario in which a smallpox epidemic occurs due to accidental contamination from a lab or other source, researchers develop an mRNA vaccine that can rapidly be ramped up to contain it, and many potential recipients say “Nuh-uh! Don’t want none of that mRNA in me!!!”
Remember the TV series “Madam Secretary”? There was an episode where a man, IIRC an archaeologist, got smallpox from finding a body in permafrost. If anything like that DID happen, the WORLD would go on lockdown.