Conversation

If you want to glimpse into a world without modern medicine, just pick up a Victorian book. In the first half of the 19th century, between 40% and 50% of children in the U.S. didn't live past the age of five. Kids were dying of diseases that are now preventable by vaccination, treatable with antibiotics, or out of the picture thanks to better sanitation, as well as from consuming unpasteurized milk or contaminated foods. @TheConversationUS looks at how this shows up in classic fiction, periodicals and personal writing. "These Victorian stories commemorate a profound, culturally shared grief. To dismiss them as old-fashioned is to assume they are outdated because of the passage of time. But the collective pain of a high child mortality rate was eradicated not by time, but by effort," writes Andrea Kaston Tange, a professor of English.

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