[ SECRET POST #2699 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2699 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Bit early today, sorry!

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 116 secrets from Secret Submission Post #386.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It likely would have been back in Austen's time. People often didn't live long bast age 50 in that era.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Especially in the higher classes, where the food they ate was incredibly unhealthy.

[odessie]

Agh, okay, I can't let that one go - either your comment or the anon one you replied to. :p This particular myth bugs the hell out of me.

Life expectancy was lower then than it is now, yes, but that didn't mean people didn't live for a long time - it's an average and heavily skewed by the very high infant mortality rates. If you managed to survive past childhood (and especially if you were a man and not then likely to die in childbirth), then your actual chances of living to a ripe old age weren't that much different than they are now. 35 was definitely not middle-aged! See here or here.

As for diet, it might not have been ideal - limited vegetables outside of season of course, so in the winter they ate a lot of pease soup, gruel, bread etc. - and contained a lot more meat than modern nutritionists advise. But in many ways it was a lot better than the diet 95% of us in the Western world eat now - all local produce cooked from scratch, with no processed crap, less salt and far less sugar. The Dashwoods lived in the country and would have eaten much better than people in towns and cities, regardless of wealth.

[(Anonymous)]

Middle aged is literally someone who has lived half of the expected life. If life expectancy was 70/80, Brandon (who is iirc 35 at the beginning and 38 by the time Marianne marries him) IS middle aged.

[(Anonymous)]

But life expectancy is between 70 and 80 now (in the US, at least), and people don't consider 35 to be middle aged.

[solticisekf]

I've read a book Tea with Austin and it said that the doctors were almost killers with all the bloodletting and giving poisons as a medicine. People also ate a lot of sweets and had problems with teeth and there were wars and dangerous sailing for men and childbirth for women. I think people lived to around 60 at that time. And I don't think it's likely that they lived longer than people do now in rural places, where some live to their 100s but majority don't. The first linked site links to a graph of Amirican history? I'm not sure about this graph, can't say I understand its sources and whatnot. The second site makes no actual point, I think.