my extended family as far as the eye can see is pretty healthy, no infant deaths, nor major hospitalizations only complications were twins 
live long fare ye well.
but past kin have died young, by fire and kicks by horses, freak gun accidents. None of those cases would make it past triage sadly, today you can get heli’d to the trauma center and live to tell.
Repeated strep infections when I was a kid might have done me in. If those didn’t leave me dead or incapacitated, I’d probably have been fine until now.
I broke my collarbone when I was 8, but it didn’t break the skin or anything, so was probably not really a danger even without modern medicine.
This is so crazy - I was thinking of posting the very same OP. So I’ve already thought out my answer:
I had chronic ear infections as a kid. The first one deadened the nerves in both my ear drums, so I can no longer feel pain in them (it has its pros and cons, trust me). I would have been a goner after not noticing subsequent infections.
RIP Randy, aged 3 years.
I probably would have died at 7 when I was hit by a car (internal bleeding). Failing that, I’d probably be hit again and killed with my terrible resulting eyesight.
Hmmm…I’ve only had to go to the hospital (not counting birth, which was perfectly normal for me and my mom,) six times. I had some kind of ankle thing as a young child, but I doubt it would have killed me, but I might have a limp today. I cut open my chin at around age 6 on a nail sticking up out of a floor (there’s a reason moms tell you not to run on hardwood floors while weariong socks.) That required stiches, but again, at worse I’d have a nasty scar today. I cut open my chin again at age 8 by slipping on some ice, More sutures, but the odds of it being life threatening without are small. I broke my collar bone at age 10, so that would have been pretty much the same treatment as it is now (don’t move the damn thing for a couple months.) At age 11 I had “cat scratch fever/disease” that resulted in a swelled lymph node in my groin area. It was eventually surgically removed (though I don’t know if it had tp be, since I’m fairly certain everyone involved thought it was a tumor, because I was never given antibiotics till after the surgery and biopsy.) I don’t know how serious of an infection that was, but it might have done me in. Finally, I had some bacterial pneumonia when I was 21 (I only went to the student health center for an initial check, then the hospital for a confirmation on the x-ray.) I got some antibiotics and it cleared up. Again, that might have done me in, or I might have survived it.
I would probably have died before birth, as both I and my older brother are RH-positive and our mother is RH-negative.
If I had made it through that, there’s a good chance I’d have snuffed it at age 13 from ethmoiditis attacking my brain.
If I had still been walking and talking after that, ulcerative colitis would surely have finished me off at age 28 by causing my colon to burst.
All in all, I’m very happy for modern medicine.
Well, I was born 2 months prematurely in December of 1970, and spent the first 5 weeks or so of my life in a heated incubator with feeding tubes. I’m pretty sure I would not have survived had I been born under such circumstances not too much earlier in history.
My daughter had a severe chest infection when she was 2 years old that required her to be under an oxygen mask for 5 days in the ICU while fed intravenously and given antbiotics. Without such medical aid she might well have died, or suffered permanent brain damage due to low oxygen levels for a protacted period.
I might have died of asthma. Or maybe not, there is less asthma in societies with less pollution, less hygiene and more parasites.
If I’d made in through pneumonia at age three, I’d likely have survived OK. No major illnesses since then and no surgery.
I’d have at least lost a leg, and probably my life, to osteomyelitis when I was a teenager. This thread makes me think, though, that people were probably tougher before modern medicine. Medievals would have laughed off a lot of the diseases that kill poor puny modern man.
I doubt it. Most if not all of the stuff mentioned in this thread would have killed off any human being, no matter how tough. We do get some diseases that medievals didn’t, some of them caused by easy living and some of them “caused” by the fact that we don’t die of anything else first, but the reason we’re here at all boils down to our ancestors having sackloads of kids, most of which died young.
I’d never have got as far as conception as my mother would have died in labour with my older brother. And even if we skip that part, we’d both have died during my birth.
Other than that I can’t think of too many things. I’m fairly healthy and tend to just burrow in and endure any illness I happen to get without too much medication. So aside from being more exposed to pathogens in a pre-vaccination era I’d say that if I made it past birth then I’d be fine.
I might have gone deaf from untreated ear infections. Then I would have died at age 23 of a UTI that went up into one of my kidneys. Assuming my depression didn’t make me kill myself first.
I’d still be alive. Aside from being born and visiting sick people, I’ve never been in a hospital.
I would have probably made it until today pretty much the way I am. However, I would still suffer from terrible acne.
People died at a much higher rate before modern medicine.
No eyeglasses would totally suck, but not kill me. Ditto gout attacks. Strep throat I got a couple of times might have killed me (don’t snort…this used to happen all the time). Got hit by a car when young, but I dunno how much of what the docs did went beyond simple observation (didn’t break bones, concussion maybe? It was almost 40 years ago).But the real killer would be appendicitis: if I hadn’t gotten that bad boy snipped, it’d be no more Malienation.
I would probably have eventually died of Crohn’s disease. Malnutrition, probably. As it was, I was severely underweight when I was a child (I still get accused of being anorexic).
I probably would have died from melanoma in my mid-20s if I hadn’t undergone surgery to have a pre-cancerous mole removed from my back. I have a lovely three-inch scar between my shoulder blades, but I’m here to tell about it.
Not sure why you would ever, ever think that. The average Medieval life expectancy, which is to say the average recorded lifespan of people from that time period, and assuming you mean Medieval Europe, was considerably shorter than those of their modern day descendants, due in no small part to advances in medical science, not to mention basic everyday things like knowledge like how diseases are actually transmitted, and technology like refrigeration and water filtration.
If you mean “Your John Q. Random at 40 years old with no major health issues in 1400 was likely much stronger constitutionally than his average 40-year-old counterpart in modern Western society”, then yeah, maybe. But if you look at the number of people born in the same birth year who actually lived to reach a hale and hearty age of 40, it’s no contest at all.
Or if you mean that “people today freak out over what was considered pretty ordinary in the past”, that’s probably also true; our standards are clearly higher. As Blackadder II put it speaking in the Elizabethan Age to someone who proudly displayed his “fascinating collection of skin diseases”: We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace and yet, Ploppy, you are without a doubt the most repulsive individual I have ever met. I would shake your hand, but I fear it would come off.
It’s possibly true that we are evolving (or on the bring of evolving) to have weaker immune systems as we increasingly have people in the reproductive gene pool with congenital issues who would never have lived to reproductive age in times past… But that’s still only really in the “First World”, the vast majority of humans alive today are really not in that category.