According to the CDC, the 10 leading causes of death for all Americans in the year 2000 were (in order) heart disease; cancer; stroke; chronic lower respiratory disease; unintentional injuries; diabetes; influenza and pneumonia; Alzheimer’s disease; nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis; and septicemia.
Let’s look back 2000 years. Were the leading causes of death for all Roman citizens in the year 3 (or so) similar to those of present-day Americans? If not, what would that top ten list look like?
And how would the leading Roman causes of death compare with the leading causes of death in other developed parts of the world? Were Chinese citizens of the time dying of similar causes? Japanese? Mayans? Other major civilizations that I’m forgetting?
We can pretty safely say that the leading causes of death in ancient Rome look nothing like that list. 8 Of the 10 are diseases primarily fatal in the elderly and late midle aged. heart disease; cancer; stroke; chronic lower respiratory disease; diabetes; influenza and pneumonia; Alzheimer’s disease; nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis.
In contrast in ancient Rome, as everywhere else in the world before the 19th century most people died before the age of 5. Not many toddlers would die of those complications.
At a WAG I’d say that the leading causes of death would have been would have been wound/lesion infection inluding septicaemia taking out 60% of the population and a range of ‘childhood’ illneses like smallpox, measles, typhoid, generic GI complaints and poliomyelitis taking out the next 30%.
The reason I’d say that wound infection would be so high is a combination of no antibiotics coupled with susceotibility being a major case of death for children suffering from other diseases and malnutrition. In colder climates hypothermia was a major cause of death amongst infants when malnutrition was the undelying cause. In the relatively mild Mediterranean I’d guess that exposure would be less of a problem and so infections would finish off the already sick people.
Blake’s answer is excellent; in addition to malnutrition and exposure, add wear-and-tear from chronic parasitic infections.
I don’t know if it was such a problem in Rome necessarily, but in much of the Mediterranean, sand getting into food led to severe wearing of the teeth. I suspect that many people died from dental abscesses.
Diarrhea from coliform bacteria, and Pneumonia associated with infectious diseases like strep throat (scarlet fever, for instance.) would be much more serious and often fatal without effective treatments. Food born pathogens could kill hundreds in a city, from a single source. Among the mature, endocarditis, and periacarditis resulting from advanced tooth decay would have been very common. They would probably not have been diagnosed. Cause of death in the first few years of the first millennium was an inexact opinion when given by a doctor, which was seldom.
Wounds would have caused lingering deaths, and life long deformities when survived, in many cases. But the frequencies of battle wounds were less common in a broad statistical sense than heroic epics would lead one to believe. Rather wounds from accidents with scythes, hammers, picks, and the like would be the more common source of such tribulations.
Infant mortality, or maternal mortality associated with childbirth, might have affected a many as thirty percent of all births.
…I seen to recall reading somewhere that something like 20% of all births would prove fatal for either the mother or the child, if not for modern-ish medical techniques.
I’ve yet to confirm that number myself, however, so take it with a grain of salt. (Or perhaps a tablespoon of salt, to be safe.) Also, it might have been referring to births taking place in mid and pre industrial Europe and America, when the science of medicine was, well, somewhat less than foolproof.
Like vasyackin, apparently, I first read the title as ‘Leading causes death 2000 years ago’, which changes the meaning entirely.
To add something constructive: the Encyclopedia Brittanica (lemma Mortality) lists the life expectancy in ancient Rome at 28 years, and mentions that risk of death starts high immediately after birth, then decreases to a minimum at 10-12 years, then rises again.
On a somewhat similar point as Tusculan is getting at, isn’t it important to remember, though, that those “life expectancy” numbers are usually skewed? From what I’ve always heard from college history professors is that there was a huge chance of a child dying before the ages of 3-5, but once you made it past that, you were likely to have at least a somewhat long-ish life. Due to the huge number of small children dying, the life expectancy average is pulled down to a low age like 30, when in fact that it is a skewed average and people who made it to 30 would likely live much longer than that.
I doubt it. Among middle- and upper-class women in early modern London, about 4% of births resulted in the death of the mother – and that was London, where sanitary conditions were appalling and doctors frequently spread infections from one woman to another. If you were delivering a baby in a little country village where the midwife might attend one birth a month, your chances were much better. However, since most women had many babies, I’m willing to believe they had a 20% chance of dying in childbirth over the course of a lifetime.
On the other hand, I have no idea how many births resulted in the death of the baby, so your source may be right on that point.
If I may suggest, bacteria-infested water was probably the leading cause, not wound-induced infection. Even with ROme’s legendary aquedecuts, there would still have been a lot of bacteria in the flow. That kills off an awful lot of children.
We’re drifting from the OP, but apart from war, Greece seems to have been a remarkably benign environment. Remember that it was the Greeks who dictated the ‘three-score and ten’ and had the world’s first documented centenarian, Aristarchus. Homer’s Nestor almost certainly existed, but doesn’t quite fit the bill. In Italy, Cicero committed suicide at an old age.
But the Year 3 was in the middle of the Pax Augusta, so war was less common than previously. The civil war that engulfed the Roman Empire for the previous century, often expressed by foreign expansion (e.g. Spain, Gaul) had gone. Pompey had crushed the pirates of the Mediterranean. Old age was quite achievable.
Thanks to everyone who’s answered so far – this has been interesting. I was pretty sure that the cause of death list would’ve changed, but I wasn’t sure in what ways.
Follow-up question: Was there a big difference in the leading causes of death in Rome or other “civilized” places vs. causes of death in “undeveloped” parts of the world? (Maybe urban vs. rural would be a better division.)
Did living in Rome give you a health advantage over living in, say, rural Ireland?
I would suspect that living in Rome (or any other densly populated area) was a distinct disadvantage. Higher population densities make communicable diseases much easier to spread, and the living conditions were probably pretty bad in some sections. In rural Ireland you had clean air, a little bit of room so that you weren’t breathing in your neighbors tuberculosis germs quite as readily, and possibly uncontaminated water (if near a spring that wasn’t downhill from a pit toilet). All things being equal, if I could provide myself with enough to eat, I would have rather been a rural dweller vs. a city dweler.
This may be a little beside the point plnnr is making, but communal living – with its increased incidence of disease – actually contributed to the rise of civilization. This is from Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, which contains fascinating thoughts on most every aspect of human civilization. Due to proximinity with animals, and each other, people living in communities contracted, and then gained resistance to, many diseases, thus increasing the chances of survival of the group as a whole.
But as I said, this isn’t exactly on the point of individual mortality.
The “three score and ten” was quoted as mans alotted time on Earth barring accident, deisease, famine, war etc. As interface2x has already said, there was a huge chance of dying young making the average life expectancy about 30. Hoever if you reached thirty you had a fair chance of reching 70. Three score and ten was a median figure for death from ‘old age’ and no reflection on the actually life expectancy.
The same applies to centenarians. There is no reason to believe that centenarians weren’t fairly common throughout human history provided you manage to survive childhood.
