this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Turns out any time period is pretty great when you're rich.
[X] doubt
There was no pain killers (except alcohol) and anesthesia just started to become available.
You still could die from a rotten teeth.
Air and water pollution was still affecting you.
I would rather say any time period is pretty bad when you are among the poorest, but it did get substantially better for other classes.
They had some pretty decent painkillers available - Opium, morphine, laudanum, cocaine, ether, chloroform. Aspirin too, technically, but that was pretty late in the game if we're staying Victorian.
IDK, medieval period seems like it kinda sucked even if you were rich. The state of their medicine seems to have been even worse than it could have been, humanity had uncovered a lot of cures that were forgotten, considered heretical (e.g. herbal experts, who were often considered witches) or even became extinct (e.g. that roman-era plant that reportedly worked as a contraceptive). And while rich people definitely had servants who cleaned up their non-~~plumping~~ plumbing toilets, that didn't quite isolate them from the kinds of illnesses that spread when everyone has to live without ~~plumping~~ plumbing.
Victorian England doesn't seem like it was much better, though.
I'm only mentioning this because it doesn't fit the rest and it's twice, but plumping means getting fat, plumbing moves water.
Geez, no idea wtf happened there. I definitely knew that it's not plumping and I don't use any autocorrect ...
Seemed weird to me, too All I can imagine is, if you happen to type "rumschlumpel" a lot, or something irl that's similarly spelled, your fingers might go "lump" out of habit. Otherwise you usually type what you intend, as far as I can see. (Any nonstandard spellings being by choice, I mean)
tbf, most herbal cures weren't considered witchcraft. Witchcraft was more of a social state than one related to any of one's actual practices (ie "We want this old widow's property"), and didn't really ramp up until the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ironically.
De Materia Medica, a Roman-era pharmaceutical text, actually survived this entire period in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, because of its usefulness. Albeit you might struggle to find many areas of early medieval Europe with a copy on hand... or the requisite knowledge to make use of it...
Victorian England is one of the few slivers of history wherein things actually got worse for people overall because of technology - not so much out of the largely-fictitious idea that industrial labor was more arduous or less profitable than subsistence farming, but because industrialization led to the sudden and rapid concentration of populations in urban centers which were not really even designed for their own current population, and a low understanding of organizational and public health principles. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that London even started filtering its fucking water. I wouldn't drink straight from the Thames today, much less in a period when upstream sewage and pollutants were poured-in willy-nilly without treatment.
Even if some ancient herbs possibly cured some diseases, nobody had any knowledge about what caused them to cure them. There were no reliable ancient cures, because we were unable to create any before we had enough scientific knowledge about our bodies to consistently replicate their effects.
There was no magical golden age of herbal cures that later became forgotten. Medical knowledge was slim and based on guesswork throughout the entirety of human history until very very recently.
So that is why it may have been much better to have been rich in ancient societies, until you became sick. Then you were basically as fucked as the poor.
Some ancient herbal medicine did survive into the scientific era. Like the invention of aspirin is based on salicylic acid in willow bark which was used as a pain relieve for thousands of years.
Cures can be forgotten without a preceding golden age. It's always one step forward, two steps back with pre-modern medicine, but that one step forward did indeed happen, repeatedly.
Many (well, some) herbal remedies etc. did and do actually work, it was just more difficult to match them to the illnesses they were actually useful against and they were less effective than our contemporary pills. e.g. they definitely had painkillers, disinfectants, emetics and laxatives. Calling them "cures" might be a bit much compared to e.g. antibiotics, but these types of things definitely still have medicinal use.
And that the current time period is pretty great even if you're kinda middle income rich.