Has charity been explored enough? Between the dark ages and today?

I am certain we had good people walking around in the 12th C, rich and poor, good Samaritans, who wanted to assist the poor.

However today we have globally organised charities with multi media marketing.

I think we can add to the list of why IM was so much higher back then.

5 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

Has charity been explored enough? Between the dark ages and today?

I am certain we had good people walking around in the 12th C, rich and poor, good Samaritans, who wanted to assist the poor.

However today we have globally organised charities with multi media marketing.

I think we can add to the list of why IM was so much higher back then.

We also have governments providing aid

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/most-of-the-worlds-foreign-aid-comes-from-governments-not-philanthropic-foundations

“95% of foreign aid comes from governments. Less than 5% comes from private philanthropic donors. This data focuses on larger private donations in the form of grants; it does not include the smaller, individual charity donations you or I might make”

edit to add: the shuttering of USAID is expected to result in more than 2 million deaths per year, and private charities can’t possibly fill the gap.

https://healthpolicy-watch.news/usaid-shut-down-lancet-millions-deaths/

The impact for killing food bank funding similarly can’t be made up with donations.

On 8/6/2025 at 9:55 PM, StringJunky said:

Chill out and learn how we converse. When in Rome... We mostly stick to the rules of the scientific method, but we aren't averse to bantering. The fact you put" "scientific" arguments" as you did suggests you aren't really into viewing things in an objective way and like to colour your thoughts with random, pulled out of your arse opinions. If you talk bollocks without references, expect pushback. The first thing I do when I join a group is figure out peoples range and level. You might do the same.

Honestly, I think I can only make a limited number of posts because of being new, so this is going to be a postzilla thanks to... you'll find out :)).

Considering you have 4 posts all reference-less in here, and although your valiant request for references is good for research-heavy circles, it's rather odd you seem to stay away from them yourself in the context of this topic. In fact, I simply took you as an example for my first post.

Going back to the subject this topic seems to tackle, it's referring to two very complex problems, different from each other, aka infant mortality rates and adult mortality rates. Is does not distinguish much between post-Black Death deaths and pre, or leaves it to us to do so. It's like analysing the Nahuatl-speaking population, or those around lake Texcoco for deaths before and after the Columbian "sojourns" (conquests) and his tasty germs. Important distinction, as we may as well look at infant mortality right now in UKRAINE. And dating burial sites with less than a "50 years window of error" is difficult. Referring to just the British Isles' gentry is limiting our ability to generalise, which the title does, unfortunately, but is a good starting point given the written evidence that exists... moreover, some of the people here seem to confuse the terms.: some research papers refer to "at birth" whilst including the whole first year of life. Some exclude stillbirths, which shouldn't be completely excluded imo if they were late pregnancies.

And you know what no one wonders about? Intentional infanticide. There was little safe birth control, if none for many, other than abstinence, spermicide/contraction herbals, or the not dangerous at all stretchy animal intestines like we do nowadays for sausage casings, except not for the kind of sausages you're thinking of. And for accidental pregnancies, the undesired children did not fare well, and might've been killed off. It doesn't seem unusual at all to consider that Medieval people, with all their woes, might've also ended the life of a sickly or malformed child to give better chances to the next (or existing ones), either passively by neglect or actively by physical means. The Ancient Greek historian Plutarch wrote about the society-wide practice of the Spartans "any child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below". Though this is still disputed, it's not hard to see why people might've done it when they lacked the conditions to keep a premature birth alive - even when considering that the presence of the Church likely made this more difficult in Medieval England. Neglect happens nowadays too A LOT to unwanted pregnancies carried to term, or if a parents gets ill. (You can easily see all the neglected children congregating on reddit these days oO) cough jokes aside:

On 7/31/2025 at 4:14 AM, Phi for All said:

Definitely the modern medical advancements. After all, in the Middle Ages, there was far less pollution and everybody was eating organic, yet life expectancy was under 50.

Death is multifaceted, and pollution tends to be slow, not swift, and, on a snide note, will become faster-acting depending on how much longer environmental regulations will be taken as a suggestion rather than rule. In fact, it is highly likely many people died during Medieval times due to sewage pollution as we'd now call it. Indoor cooking and exposure to fumes and particulate matter likely contributed to earlier deaths as well, particularly due to the UK's poor climate (wet and cold) which forced cooking indoors and with improperly cured logs (wood likely to still hold moisture); but also due to molds. Speaking of cooking fumes: "For billions of people across the developing world, particularly children and women, mealtime starts by firing up a kerosene stove, lighting a charcoal grill or setting some logs ablaze. The problem: much of this cooking happens inside and the smoke it produces is laced with toxic particles. This type of household air pollution led to 3.1 million premature deaths in 2021." comments the UN https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/cooking-smoke-kills-millions-every-year-heres-what-world-can-do-about

Immediate or identifiable pollution-attributed direct death is low in the general population unless they live close to spill sites, are influenced directly by a large pollution event, or work with, say, coal tar... and few people suggest otherwise. What pollution does is reduce quality of life and make it easier for the manifestations of disease/imbalance to form in a way we can identify, such as cancer (see the thyroid cancer rates in Fukushima and nearby fishing villages if they show that too https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5770131/); or the deaths attributed to cardiopulmonary arrests and cancers due to air pollution with particulate matter (but not only) from coal burning in Ulaanbaatar https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3578716/. Although this pollution was measured mostly in PM2.5, you should know pollution is measured in more ways than this, including ground-level ozone, but they just needed to prove a point swiftly. P.M. itself further differs in chemical composition depending on where it comes from, with the oft radioactive coal not being a great source to inhale from compared to pollen for instance - I hope the ironic use of "not great" is obvious - , as pollen also breaks down to a size of 2.5 as a P.M.). As you see, we could be here until tomorrow if we delved into topics how you think we should, but very few do (this sentence is aimed at some two posters above me who did not like the lack of Googly woogly references).

In any case, it seems to me like most posts actually agree with each other that the cumulative knowledge of medicine and the world around us has put us in a better spot than before when it comes to infant mortality rates, so I'm not sure why people get so upset at each other for. L'amour de l'art de la polemique.

On 8/6/2025 at 6:38 PM, CharonY said:

Unfortunately, I do not see a lot scientific knowledge represented here.

I am not sure why you are so fascinated with STDs specifically. They have a long history with us, but so do many other infectious diseases. It is difficult to compare scope throughout history, but HIV is (was likely to be again) a killer of infants (to go back to OP) but it is a more modern pathogen.

In regards to my observation of the impact of STDs and STIs in infant mortality rates, I don't know... you make a good point to remember about HIV, but just because you've never heard about the rest, doesn't mean you couldn't google it for 5 minutes and then claim it's non-scientific... it's really not such an incredible comment to write.

STDs and STIs, which existed in Medieval England, that can cause and likely caused infant mortality, either soon after birth (within the first year) or due to miscarriage, included syphilis, gonorrhea, HPV, hepatitis B/C, chlamydia. They still do sometimes nowadays too, but since most of those are bacterial, we can cure them with antibiotics, and for the viral like the HPV, there are vaccines offered in the UK.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9302697/: effects of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and hepatitis C on infants are significant, from association with low birth weight to being born stillborn or calling for C-sections (which the Medieval Ages didn't really have; and which effects or deaths, like back then, may also just be caused by poverty-associated issues). Whilst the numbers of such deadly infections on fetuses remain low generally, that is because the study was done in 2022, when infant mortality had been greatly reduced to just 1-2%! (this surprised me too for that area of Brazil. Anyways, if you check the Nuffield Report 2018 on infant deaths 2017 vs 1948, it's the same for England, even lower death averages in general) https://www.scielosp.org/article/csc/2025.v30suppl1/e16642023/en/

Unfortunately, due to limitations in not just funding but also surviving archaeological evidence, only the more destructive ones like syphillis can be more accurately identified in bodies after death and decomposition due to the disease's effects on the bones; and this means that this one ended up being the most studied, or amongst the most studied. Surprisingly, and simply throwing this here because now unlike the middle ages we have condoms that everyone affords to buy or get, Gonhorrea cases are rising compared to 1920 when much less people used barrier protection and there was no NHS in England (so was this data recorded accurately at all?), but the Spike's origin is suggested to be in the foreign-born population, which could or could not be true, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nnmgzkgm3o + the different sourced chart below:

As Smiths College points out, "Some historians have long believed that treponematosis existed in medieval Europe, but paleopathologists (who work with teeth, bones, and aDNA) lacked the evidence to prove it. Over the last decade, however, instances of skeletal remains with damage symptomatic of treponemal disease have appeared more often in the literature." For example, for King Edward IV's death, the chronicler wrote "that the king had died of an “unknown” disease not easy to cure even in a man of “lesser status.”" which is now apparently believed to have been syphillis. There is a lot of interpretation to be had when it comes to the centuries that passed and sometimes the best thing we have is our own rationality and knowledge. Unfortunately, it's chronic diseases that tend to leave traces on the skeleton. And all archaeologists many times have is odd description of Ungodly plagues, and bones.

If modern day's burden of infant deaths attributable to sexually transmitted diseases and infections is at in less developed places such as... Florida... (*cough* xD), even this study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8284346/) says "The lack of recent and national data assessing neonatal herpes mortality remains a substantial knowledge gap that this investigation aims to address." as well as "We are aware of only 3 US studies that characterize herpes-related infant mortality in a defined population" and it's also because I think we should all know how deaths are coded in public hospitals due to laziness, lack of interest or tiredness of staff... this I speak from genuine experience and friends from the system. if you want to believe that or don't, that is entirely your problem (whoever reads this) as I doubt any hospital would let me publish official statistics on their "malpractice" or "bad data input practices" without big funding going on. However, the Covid Pandemic has made this a point of discussion as "excess mortality attributed to COVID deaths when other co-morbidities might've, in fact, played a bigger role."

Further on the nutritional difficulties of women who had to carry the fetuses (Uni. of Reading, Shapland F et al. 2016):

"An average age at menarche of between 15 and 16 years would be much later than the modern British average of just under 13 years. In addition to their shorter stature, this finding adds weight to the argument that environmental factors such a deficient diet and disease were having a negative impact on medieval female growth and development." They go to suggest that "This may suggest that girls who experienced poorer conditions for childhood and adolescent growth were more likely to die around or before the age of 25 years." which would contradict the statement below that, sure, it arguably was discussing infant mortality, but the context as a whole also included adult females carrying them, dying:

On 8/6/2025 at 6:38 PM, CharonY said:

On 8/6/2025 at 6:38 PM, CharonY said:

While better social structures are likely always helpful, the issue is that in the middle ages modern medicine was not available. No level of redistribution of wealth would have solved that issue.

I mostly agree that it wouldn't have changed it a lot, if we assume people ended in poverty due to irremediable undesirable traits for those times such as learning difficulties, but it would've made a nice dent in our What-if exercise, should we assume poverty happened more by chance and was, to a certain point, undeserved more than anything else.

We might as well be The Medievals to the people who will be born in 1000 years from now, and so, just like you now say "redistribution" (of kindness/education/wealth/etc.!) was not important for them, someone in 1000 years could write the same about us now. That perspective changes the parameters slightly, I believe. Like a Yankee in King Arthur's court ;)

Edited August 12Aug 12 by FreeStyle

Even though they consumed non-processed foods,unlike us,their life expectancy were low due to rudimentary medical advancements.Similarly,the hygiene was not advanced so the diseases could emanate easily.Because of the medical advancements were not enough,some of these easily cured diseases-now in our time-were fatal especially for infants and children.All of these combined,the death in early age was inevitable.

14 hours ago, geneticenthusiast said:

the death in early age was inevitable.

Death in any age is inevitable.

On 9/27/2025 at 5:08 AM, iNow said:

Death in any age is inevitable.

you are right man,we cant escape from death.