I’ve always known childhood mortality was horrific before the advent of modern medicine, but wow…
I was perusing Wikipedia, and came across a list of the children of US Presidents. Every single presidential family lost at least one minor child until 1844’s James K. Polk. And Polk didn’t lose any because he never had kids. The first president to have all his children lived to adulthood is Millard Fillmore. Thomas Jefferson lost the most. Four children. Six, if you count his kids with Sally Hemings.
But holy hell, the Washingtons lost three, the Adamses four between the two generations, Pierce, Lincoln, and Hayes lost three apiece.
When you consider that these were well off families with access to the best medical care available, it really sends a chill through you.
This is not even counting grown children of presidents who died before their famous parent did. There’s a surprising number of those too. Beau Biden included.
Speaking of Beau, Joe Biden is the most recent president to lose a minor child. That was in a car wreck. Before that, you’d have to go back to George H.W. Bush, who lost a daughter at three years of age to leukemia.
Hug your kids. I don’t have any, but I still am solemn after reading about this.
I have a friend in his 30s (?) who was born with a rare heart defect. Perfect timing. A surgeon developed a technique to repair this defect and had used it in a single patient prior to my friends birth.
He had the surgery and survived. Had he been born a few months earlier, he would have died before he was a month old.
Not only the kids dying, but the mothers dying in childbirth. Like my maternal grandmother, who died while giving birth to my youngest aunt (who lived well into her 80s).
Our family had an opposite situation. My mom’s youngest sister was born in 1946. The doctors told my grandparents she’d not live past her teens. She died in 2012 at age 64.
But I’m sure in the generation before that, when both sides of the family were peasants in Poland, there was probably a fair rate of infant/childhood mortality.
My maternal grandparents had two twins die, because my grandmother was Rh-negative, and either mom or my uncle was Rh-positive, as were the twins. One twin lived a few days, while the other lived a couple years.
They were never talked about until one say we saw their graves on Memorial Day.
My paternal grandmother was born in 1902; she didn’t talk a lot about her family or siblings with us, but when she passed away in 1991, and we went to the burial ceremony at her family’s plot (in a small town in Wisconsin), I saw headstones for her siblings; she had four siblings, total, two of whom died in young childhood, and all of whom had died before I was born.
If you really want to be struck by this sort of thing, go to some of the old cemeteries in Boston or other very old cities like that.
It’s shocking how many children’s graves there are, and how many relatively young women’s there are. And for that matter, how many people in their 20s through 50s. I was shocked by that- graves of 32 year old women and 40 year old men, for example.
But then again, a LOT of people died of stuff that we’re vaccinated for these days, or that public health initiatives have nearly eliminated. Tuberculosis was one of the biggest killers in 19th and early 20th century America, for example. Smallpox, cholera, and typhus were also big killers before the modern public health era.
And back then, people died a lot more often from bacterial infections- infected cuts, pneumonia, etc… Stuff that we’d go get a round of antibiotics for and go about our business were serious killers back then.
My great-grandmother lost two teenaged daughters to “bovine tuberculosis”, probably from drinking unpasteurized milk. This would have been in the first decade of the 20th century. While pasteurization was well-known, it wasn’t all that common for milk.
Add to that list bacillary dysentery and “summer diarrhea”, major killers of children in the 1700s and 1800s. Diphtheria, measles and scarlet fever are examples of other diseases that rarely strike down childen anymore.
I was struck by this same point while reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. In the course of her book, Goodwin writes little biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet. And it struck me that pretty much all of them had experienced the death of a child. And as the OP noted, these were all men who were well off and didn’t lack access to the medical care of their era.
Even the best medical care of past eras was still primitive. It was “kill or cure” much of the time. I am glad I live in the age of modern medicine, and would not want the “good old days” back for any amount of money.
The elders I knew, all born early 1900s, had stories of losing siblings to “summer fever”, blood poisoning, and broken bones, even. One of my granddad’s cousins had a type of “dent” in his forehead, due to being kicked by a horse. He lived, but he was damaged from it, suffering from many problems. They all broke horses, were expert riders, but even so, horses were known to be dangerous, and death and accidents were common when working with animals.
My grandmother almost died of childbirth, even. My mom was thus an only child. My existence on this earth is truly a thin thread. I never forget that fact.
I have a couple of uncles of my parents’ generation that died.
My father’s brother, Arthur, developed appendicitis and the misdiagnosed it and gave him laxatives. My grandmother suffered from serious depression at the time and, looking back, it probably continued throughout her life.
My mother had a brother Gerald who died at three weeks. She didn’t know much about it – until I found him when I was researching my family tree, she didn’t even know his name. Her parents never spoke of it, other than alluding to it and making sure she was born in a hospital (Gerald was born at home, I gather).
My paternal grandfather, whom I called Pop-Pop, who was a major influence in my life, had an older brother who died at the age of six months, two years before Pop-Pop was born.
Pop-Pop never told me about him. I didn’t know he existed until I found his information on Find a Grave online, after Pop-Pop’s death.
That might have been part of the problem. In those days the best medical care might kill you faster than the worst medical care. Death in childbirth was very common until the late 19th century when doctors started washing their hands and sterilizing the equipment. Hospitals before then were patronized only by the working and lower classes, because anyone who was middle class and above avoided them like the literal plague.
Improvement in sanitation during childbirth was a bit reason for the increase in life expectancy at the time.
Since we’re revealing family stories of loss here, I would like to add that my mother had two siblings die in early childhood before she was born. One of them had Down’s Syndrome. I don’t know about the other.
My dad’s family came through with no losses. But it was a smaller family.
My father’s infant brother was less than a month old when he died. It was right at the end of World War I, so it might have had something to do with the Spanish Flu. No one ever talked about it.
My grandmother had breast cancer when my mom was in her mid-teens but despite being sent home to die when Mom was in the 10th grade, my grandmother went into remission for several years. I was five when the cancer came back, and six and a half when all hope was lost.
To comfort me, my grandmother told me a few weeks before she died that going to heaven wouldn’t be so bad, especially because she’d finally get to see her angel baby brother and sister again, and her mom and dad too.
When I innocently mentioned the “angel babies” to Mom shortly after my grandmother died, she wondered if the cancer had spread to my grandmother’s brain. She confirmed with my uncle (the youngest sibling) that no such children had ever existed. Grandmother had been the second of eight children, six of whom were still alive at the time, and the seventh had died as an adult.
Except when they later talked to my aunt (the oldest sibling) she told them of course the dead babies had existed. They’d been their maternal grandparents’ youngest children, twins, who had both died at age two during a flu epidemic.
No one ever figured out why my grandmother had told her oldest daughter that she’d had nine siblings and let her two younger children believe there’d only been seven.
My grandmother had two brothers die as children – one from whooping cough, another from tetanus. Which is an extremely painful way to die, from what I gather.
And don’t forget that the Kennedys lost a son, Patrick, right before JFK was killed, who died as an infant. If he had born nowadays,they most likely could’ve saved him, but at the time, although they really could do was monitor his condition.
I probably owe my existence to child mortality. My ancestor who came to the New World from Switzerland was the 15th of 15 children. About half died in infancy. Not sure the parents would have had 15 if so many had not died. I’ve also speculated he left because he knew there would not be much land left for him once the family domain was divvied up among all the siblings.
No doubt there are other examples in my line, but that’s the one I know most about.