Birth. As in, "Mr. Cat, if we don’t perform a C section right the fuck now, you will have a dead wife and a dead child.
My father had all natural stuck in his head, but it wasn’t meant to be.
You guys with bad eyes, you might not have bad eyes if you didn’t live in an industrial society:
"The most striking demonstration of this [myopia being caused by civilization] was a study in the late 60s of eyesight among Eskimoes [sic] in Barrow, Alaska. These people had been introduced to the joys of civilization around World War II. The incidence of myopia in those age 56 and up was zero percent; in parents age 30 and up, 8 percent; in their children, 59 percent.
“The same phenomenon has turned up in studies of other newly-civilized peoples, suggesting that modern life somehow causes nearsightedness.”
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_105.html
It’s debatable whether modern medicine has been a net positive or negative in my life. I was born in the 1970s, when formula was pushed as being better for babies than boobs, “modern” drugs for pain-free childbirth were all the rage, and C-sections were performed at rates much higher than for any other nation in the industrialized world. I was supposedly a breech baby, but things I’ve read about reforms in care relating to childbirth make me think that they didn’t give me enough time to turn, and that my mom didn’t have a good position for birthing. She told me that she was reprimanded for wanting to walk around and sent back to bed. She might have had a successful vaginal delivery and shorter labor if she’d gone to a midwife.
Instead, after about 20 hours of labor they ended up cutting her open, and she got gutted again a couple of more times for my two younger sisters. Later, when she was in her late 30s and was trying to lose weight and get in shape, she consulted a doctor about getting a tummy tuck. The doctor’s reaction upon examining her was, “Who the hell butchered you?” Years of horrible backaches bad enough to temporarily cripple her at times were apparently caused by at least one bad surgery job that screwed up her stomach muscles so badly that they essentially didn’t work anymore. What she thought was a bulging stomach due to being overweight was bulging because her muscles couldn’t hold in her internal organs.
I had pneumonia once when I was four. But then again, both my parents smoked until I was ten, so I might have been okay in a time prior to widespread smoking. I broke my wrists a few years ago, but that circumstance is entirely related to the modern world, and I’d made it past full adulthood without breaking any bones despite being active and doing some risky things (like jumping off very high roofs) as a kid. Other than those things, I’ve pretty much not needed any medical treatment. No allergies, no asthma, eyesight good, few cavities despite a kind of crappy diet when I was young.
I know for sure that at the other end of things, for terminal diseases modern medicine sucks donkey balls. All my relatives who have died, save one, have died of cancer. None of them were saved by medical treatment. All that was done was to prolong things and put them through a lot more suffering than they would have without treatment. My mother in particular went through surgery, chemo, and still had the cancer spread to her brain. Instead of dying in weeks from that, radiation treatment gave the shell of my mother nine more months of aphasic, deranged, confused, pain-filled existence.
How bad were these experiences? Let’s just say that I’m a strong proponent of voluntary euthanasia and that I have no intention of ever letting a doctor touch me after I find out that I have a terminal disease. Dying of cancer scares the shit out of me, but nowhere near as much as dying slowly of cancer over the course of months and months. If I end up like Terri Schiavo, I’ve already told all my relatives to tell the doctors where to stick the feeding tube, and if I were living in a country that even slightly honored living wills, I’d have one made up.
I don’t know what would have happened if a really bad urinary tract infection wasn’t treated with antibiotics. By the time I got to the hospital, I was peeing thick, dark red, clumpy blood. It hurt like nothing else. So yeah, that probably would have killed me.
I’ll oppologize if this question winds up sounding rude, but why was your father making that decision on his own?
Postpartum hemorrhage would have done me in at the ripe old age of 25. I almost lost my daughter to infection caused by third degree burns at 19 months old. (We almost lost her with modern medicine.) However, my husband wouldn’t have made it to a month old.
Abcessed teeth, a few years back. Of course, I also managed to develope an allergy to penicillan. Yay!
Depends on how old he/she is, but that used to be pretty standard. When my grandmother almost died delivering my uncle, the doctor felt it would be best to tie her tubes so she wouldn’t have any more children. The conversation was conducted entirely with my grandfather, while my grandmother was still knocked out (they used to sedate women giving birth).
There might’ve been birth complications (forceps birth). I had pneumonia when I was around 6 or 7 – that would have killed me off for sure. Been a couple of nasty bronchitis infections since then.
I would likely have died of rabies at the age of six. If I hadn’t gotten the rabies, I’d have been in danger again from recurrent strep infections when I was eleven or twelve, and if I’d survived those, the precancerous growths in my thyroid would probably have progressed to cancer and killed me by now (they’d have had thirteen years in which to do it). I would also be missing most of my molars, but that would be more likely to shorten my life indirectly than to kill me outright.
Mr. Legend would have died of a burst appendix at age thirteen. If he’d somehow have survived that, typhoid would have killed him a month later.
Failure to thrive, caused by some kind of not-hooked-up right issue with the gi tract, when I was a baby. I have no idea of the details, but apparently I spent the first few months of my life looking like a tiny wax doll.
If that didn’t do it, asthma at age 2, when I turned blue on the way to the hospital.
I was really not a hardy child.
Obsidian answered the question better than I could have! I’m recounting a story told to me as a kid, and neither Mom nor Dad are still with us to ask for details. I do know that Mom was sedated but not unconscious–even the C-section was done with spinal anesthesia rather than a general, because she specifically said she wanted to remember the birth of her baby.
I’ll be charitable and assume that the doctor wasn’t just asking my father what he wanted done with His Property–maybe hospital policy was for both parents to be ok with how the birth was handled, but policy didn’t count on my father being irrational? Hey, speculation and $1.50 will get you a coffee at Dunkin Donuts.
Oh, and I’m in my 40s. (Early 200s in cat years 
)
Malnutrition and/or measles in my first year would have likely done me in. But if not at least I wouldn’t have had to deal with the nasty vaccine reaction in my first year that almost lost me my leg!
Anaphylaxis would have made me keel.
If not that, then an ex of mine would have beaten me to death. Twas modern medicine that made sure I didn’t croak that round.
Many ear infections throughout youth.
Mastoid operation
Rheumatic fever -twice
2-bowel obstructions
burst appendix
Aspirin allergy
typical child of the 50s
Age 9 months: Intussuception (kinked intestine). Without 20th Century surgery, I would be dead.
Age 33: Depressed skull fracture with subdural hematoma. Without 21st Century surgery, I would be dead, a vegetable, or a cripple.
I would have died in childbirth (I was close to a month premature, and had to be treated for close to two weeks before I left the hospital), and my birth would have killed my mother (she had to return for treatment of complications a few days after my birth).
However, my birth would have been purely hypothetical, as my father would have died either of the tumor he had removed as an infant or in the heavy machinery accident he had when he was twenty.
When I broke my hip in 2005, the doctor said it was common for people to die from it 100 years ago. I didn’t ask him why, and assume it’d be from pneumonia, from inactivity. Or maybe a blood clot. ?
My third child had pyloric stenosis so he probably wouldn’t have survived.
My husband has high blood pressure and diabetes but is doing pretty well with medications. My brother’s diabetes would have killed him at 47 instead of 60 if it hadn’t been for medical intervention.
Measles and pneumonia at 8 weeks. ICU.
Nothing since then that would have been fatal, although I would probably be lame from an injury that was treated with extraordinary alacrity by the Royal Netherlands Air Force medical folks. Morphine within a minute, ice within three minutes, and Valium within a couple of hours. Spasms would almost surely have aggravated the injury enough to at least give me the ability to predict the weather.
Tris