Comment by pavel_lishin
10 years ago
I imagine that people were largely indifferent to the loss of a child in "ye olden times" because it was expected, and they hardened themselves to the probability. Childhood mortality was atrocious back in the day.
I would think "indifferent" is a stretch, but would agree it's something that almost everyone experienced themselves or in their immediate circles.
Another difference is that generally, "pain and suffering" was not seen as deserving financial compensation. That changed at some point last century also, maybe as it became more rare and thus more shocking to judges and juries.
Pain and suffering were well established as part of compensatory damages by the early 19th century. My theory for why they became more common was the industrial revolution. In agrarian societies, it's rare for someone to get hurt in a way that could've been prevented by someone else exercising more care.
Maybe not. Listening to the History of England podcast, was pointed to the poem "Pearl" https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/03/a-short-summary... and http://www.billstanton.co.uk/pearl/pearl_new.htm which includes a father's grieving for his lost two year old daughter. So some evidence that these losses were keenly felt.
Another example are Laments by a great Polish 16th century poet (Kochanowski).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laments_(Kochanowski)
Also from the American tradition I wish my baby was born. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFpU3zslpHw
Another famous example is Wordsworth's "Suprised by joy - impatient as the wind", c. 1800. See e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/sep/22/poem... for the poem and exposition.
Are we indifferent to our parents dying later in life as we're hardened to the probability?
It might make it slightly easier having an expectation. But indifferent seems a massive stretch.
Also reproduction rates. From what I understand, in hunter-gatherer societies, children were breast-fed for a number of years, and, since women generally are infertile when nursing, children were spaced out. With agriculture infants came to be fed on porridge, goats milk, etc, and so the size of families increased greatly. And this made sense economically, since children can't hunt and are of limited use gathering, but even a very young one can pull weeds.
>since women generally are infertile when nursing
Fertility may be reduced but they are absolutely not infertile.
Source: a friend of my wife who got pregnant while breastfeeding and various doctors and midwives who repeated "you can get pregnant while breastfeeding" like some sort of chant in the weeks following the birth of our child.
They aren't absolutely infertile, but in hunter gather societies this is handled by infanticide. When it isn't possible for a mother to support two children under the age of four, the only solution was to kill one, which is what they did.
In the _Wandering God_ by Morris Berman, there is a story of a story of a girl (maybe 19th or early 20th century?) in a nomadic society in Africa. Her mother got pregnant again and was going to kill the baby, but the three year old child protested and agreed to go with being breast fed to try to save her newborn sibling. It wasn't possible to breastfeed two children at once, so her mother was going to kill the infant.
Miraculously the child managed to survive, but it was by no means guaranteed and she had to figure out to be self sufficient to some degree. It was considered such an odd occurrence that the relevant anthropologist reported the story.
I think we forget that infanticide wasn't uncommon that long ago. It was one of the major 'moral' victories of Christianity to make infanticide uncommon. And it could only do that because it wasn't necessary anymore.
You can't seriously think mother's have not mourned a dead child at all times.
Even from the logical point of view of if they don't love and miss why care for the child at all.
Yes, and another key difference between 17th and 21st century Europe is the status of women. Starting with literacy; we can record our sorrows now.
I wonder whether contemporary societies with less status for women and lower female literacy also have less formal/legal value on children. (India?)
Of course they did, but there's still a big difference between a society where child death is a rare tragedy and one where child death is unavoidable and common.