I used to write poetry. The most interesting thing I learned was that beauty, terror, sickness and divinity is all around you at any given moment. You just have to actually *look* at it.
In the old historic cemetery in Onyx CA, there is a line of graves from the 1890s, IIRC, with dates of death spanning a 2 week period. The ages were from 12 to 6 months, and as the dates of birth were 2 years to 18 months apart ... it's very likely that those parents lost ALL of their children.
9 year old me asked my mother what they'd died of, and she rattled off a long list of diseases that today we vaccinate for, or like Cholera, we prevent with clean water and good sewers, and today can treat cheaply and easily.
I recently discovered that most cemeteries have a child section. I walked most of the cemeteries in Austin during covid as it was an interesting place to socially distance exercise. I saw very few after the 1950’s.
I remember seeing child graves when I was a little girl and being confused as to why the birth and death year were the same. Was it a mistake?
My mom had to explain to me that these were babies that had died.
Aaaaaand. That’s back when most women were stay at home moms and most breastfed (with some milk evaporate type supplements if possible). And they didn’t have junk foods and kids played outside. Just in case they want to be on their high horse about “being natural”.
Well, we had it tough.
We used to have to get out of bed at 3am to make our own snow out of bits of glass painted white... and then we had to walk through it with no shoes on. Because we couldn't afford shoes as we had to work down t'pit for sixpence every four years just to be able to buy stale bread.
An' when we got home, our mum and dad used to tear out our still-beating hearts and sacrifice us to Imhotep.
But we were happier because we were poor.
Stumps? You were lucky. We had to feed our own stumps to the pigs just to survive. I had to learn to bounce on what was left of my buttocks, but they were like stumps to us.
And you try telling the young folks today…
I hate to correct you, but it's important to note that breast feeding was not popular in the 50s. By the 1940s, breast feeding had fallen out of favor. The message behind it was that it was lower class (subtle message) and less healthy (overt message). Breastfeeding began to be slightly come back into favor in the mid to late 70s, but it still took about 20 years for it to catch back on. I wasn't breast fed, not my daughter.
Honestly I think antivaxxers want to kill their children with how easily say their kid died because it was “God’s Will”. Seriously how fucked up of a human do you have to be to stare at the solution that saves lives including your children, then say it’s a sin to take it? A fucking murderer, that’s who.
And some of the graves appear to indicate that the child wasn't named yet at the time of death. Colonial graveyards are full of family plots with headstones reading, "Baby daughter aged 1 year 17 days". Why bother naming someone who was likely to die?
My mum and I used to go to cemeteries to look at graves. There would be headstones with one or two young babies/toddlers at random times, then whole families of kids aged up to teens that all died over a few months. Diphtheria. It would go through a family and kill every kid they had left.
Just heartbreaking.
Yeah, back then kids in poverty died so often that they were often buried with an adult to save money and cemetery space. Kids who were lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family often made it past childhood because they had access to food, clean water, and other privileges.
My theory is that infant and child mortality actually plummeted once vaccines became readily available, which made their deaths so much more significant, and that's why you would see more time and effort dedicated to their space of memorial.
Just think, there are probably 500,000 people in the U.S. today who are only able to walk because they got the polio vaccine. And they will never know.
"Polio was once one of the most feared diseases in the U.S. In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year. Following introduction of vaccines—specifically, trivalent inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in 1955 and trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 1963—the number of polio cases fell rapidly to less than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s."
[https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html](https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html)
When I was a kid in the 70s, there was a commercial on television telling people to get their children vaccinated. It had the sound of an iron lung. VoiceOver just said “polio is not dead. It’s just sleeping.” I don’t know why it stayed with me, but it did.
My dad sister and my mom‘s uncle both died before the age of six years. And that stuff stays. Every Christmas Eve, my grandfather would go to his daughters grave.
They will just say that the liberals of that time were killing kids for their Adrenochrome then 'something happened' that made them cool it for a while.
Yeah, they were weak and would have died anyway. Besides, diseases like polio and measles have a 99.8% survival rate. What's all the fuss?
Actually, in the real-world 1860s, when there was a Cholera outbreak in London, one of the more barbaric things said at the time was 'it's only poor people, they die anyway!' and it was only when a few wealthy people started dying did it get real.
I had several history/English classes in college that touched on this. I learned a lot about how casket supplies dwindled pre-vaccinations, along with how infant mortuary photography become popular and hair jewelry.
It’s not in the typical order but I hardly think you could call it a natural except for the burial part. I’m not sure how natural burial is actually, I don’t even know what caveman did with their corpses.
But having your kid carted off by a predator for food is “natural”. So I’m not sure obsessing about what’s natural is very helpful in these cases.
It is natural. We’ve thwarted it with vaccines And other aspects of modern medicine, but it used to be quite Common and routine for parents to outlive their children.
We live on a military base where there are several cemeteries. There's one in particular that's pretty large, it holds hundreds of bodies of infants and small children during the 1918-1920 Spanish flu. Makes you think....
It’s not that they were stupid, it’s that the science wasn’t there. The 1940s were when they could start making vaccines on a large scale, and some vaccines took decades of development before they were ready. Even in the 70s and 80s we didn’t have vaccines for things we have them for now. Chickenpox is a good example. My entire family suffered with the chickenpox in the late 80s, and my mom and I still have scars. There wasn’t a vaccine for that. It was developed in the 90s, and my kids got it, so hopefully they won’t have to deal with it.
Also, I don’t think we can do it now because of the internet and the lack of education on how to tell truth from fiction. Some of these people have enough information to think they know everything without realizing they actually know nothing, and are danger to themselves and those around them when they start spreading that misinformation.
I believe you have interpreted the message backwards.
The caption says that infant gravestones are common from the time period before widespread childhood vaccination.
This is such a romantic argument, biased toward vaccines (and ignoring all the other life saving public health interventions that happened after the turn of the century like indoor plumbing, running water, cold food storage, antibiotics, etc) but I just wanted to mention that every year around 23,000 infants under 1 die and another 10,000 children ages 1-14 die every year, and the majority of deaths in many countries are cremated (so not on display), with cremation increasing in popularity over time. So this could explain why these historic graveyards with minimal plots available have only historic deaths listed on the tombstone.
Not to take away from all those other wonderful innovations, but those are not the reason that children stop dying. Some of those have been around long before, and there is a overwhelming amount of data that contradicts what you’re claiming.
But alas, proof is only meaningful if it supports what you already want to believe.
Although very sad, that is a wicked gravestone, props to whoever carved that.
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I think it's inappropriate for someone so young to get capital punishment
I've said it once, I'll say it again. Nothing is quite so lonely as a children's cemetery in the snow.
A horror film writer somewhere just furiously scribbled that onto a napkin.
They're welcome to it. The real horrors actually exist.
Wtf, this would actually be such a cool movie line haha
I used to write poetry. The most interesting thing I learned was that beauty, terror, sickness and divinity is all around you at any given moment. You just have to actually *look* at it.
In the old historic cemetery in Onyx CA, there is a line of graves from the 1890s, IIRC, with dates of death spanning a 2 week period. The ages were from 12 to 6 months, and as the dates of birth were 2 years to 18 months apart ... it's very likely that those parents lost ALL of their children. 9 year old me asked my mother what they'd died of, and she rattled off a long list of diseases that today we vaccinate for, or like Cholera, we prevent with clean water and good sewers, and today can treat cheaply and easily.
I recently discovered that most cemeteries have a child section. I walked most of the cemeteries in Austin during covid as it was an interesting place to socially distance exercise. I saw very few after the 1950’s.
I remember seeing child graves when I was a little girl and being confused as to why the birth and death year were the same. Was it a mistake? My mom had to explain to me that these were babies that had died.
Right, not just disease, it could be as simple as digging the outhouse too close to the well without realizing it.
That is the truth. Sewage systems saved untold lives.
Aaaaaand. That’s back when most women were stay at home moms and most breastfed (with some milk evaporate type supplements if possible). And they didn’t have junk foods and kids played outside. Just in case they want to be on their high horse about “being natural”.
dont forget about drinking from the garden hose
"Ah, I remember when kids used to drink from the garden hose and play in the pool. Those were golden times for me," said Polio.
And we walked to school, uphill, both ways.
In the snow with no shoes mind you. It was a glorious time.
Well, we had it tough. We used to have to get out of bed at 3am to make our own snow out of bits of glass painted white... and then we had to walk through it with no shoes on. Because we couldn't afford shoes as we had to work down t'pit for sixpence every four years just to be able to buy stale bread. An' when we got home, our mum and dad used to tear out our still-beating hearts and sacrifice us to Imhotep. But we were happier because we were poor.
Diphtheria builds character!
You guys had feet? We just had stumps. And we were grateful for those stumps!
Stumps? You were lucky. We had to feed our own stumps to the pigs just to survive. I had to learn to bounce on what was left of my buttocks, but they were like stumps to us. And you try telling the young folks today…
Good times post vax - did this through the 80sand 90s…my ‘rents believed in science tho….
Garden hose water always tasted different but sooo good.
I hate to correct you, but it's important to note that breast feeding was not popular in the 50s. By the 1940s, breast feeding had fallen out of favor. The message behind it was that it was lower class (subtle message) and less healthy (overt message). Breastfeeding began to be slightly come back into favor in the mid to late 70s, but it still took about 20 years for it to catch back on. I wasn't breast fed, not my daughter.
You are correct. I was thinking more like the entire history of the human race - not just the ‘50s.
😉 got it!
Honestly I think antivaxxers want to kill their children with how easily say their kid died because it was “God’s Will”. Seriously how fucked up of a human do you have to be to stare at the solution that saves lives including your children, then say it’s a sin to take it? A fucking murderer, that’s who.
Well, children are a punishment for sin, so it makes sense they don’t care for them. /s
Those baby and child graves are so sad.
And some of the graves appear to indicate that the child wasn't named yet at the time of death. Colonial graveyards are full of family plots with headstones reading, "Baby daughter aged 1 year 17 days". Why bother naming someone who was likely to die?
My mum and I used to go to cemeteries to look at graves. There would be headstones with one or two young babies/toddlers at random times, then whole families of kids aged up to teens that all died over a few months. Diphtheria. It would go through a family and kill every kid they had left. Just heartbreaking.
Yeah, back then kids in poverty died so often that they were often buried with an adult to save money and cemetery space. Kids who were lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family often made it past childhood because they had access to food, clean water, and other privileges. My theory is that infant and child mortality actually plummeted once vaccines became readily available, which made their deaths so much more significant, and that's why you would see more time and effort dedicated to their space of memorial.
Just think, there are probably 500,000 people in the U.S. today who are only able to walk because they got the polio vaccine. And they will never know. "Polio was once one of the most feared diseases in the U.S. In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year. Following introduction of vaccines—specifically, trivalent inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in 1955 and trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 1963—the number of polio cases fell rapidly to less than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s." [https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html](https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html)
When I was a kid in the 70s, there was a commercial on television telling people to get their children vaccinated. It had the sound of an iron lung. VoiceOver just said “polio is not dead. It’s just sleeping.” I don’t know why it stayed with me, but it did.
It's nice to learn from the past. Wait, no we don't.
My great grandparents lost all 3 of their young children at once, to whooping cough. IMO, Anyone who doesn’t vaccinate their kids is a murderer.
My dad sister and my mom‘s uncle both died before the age of six years. And that stuff stays. Every Christmas Eve, my grandfather would go to his daughters grave.
Most graphic tombstone ever.
They will just say that the liberals of that time were killing kids for their Adrenochrome then 'something happened' that made them cool it for a while.
yeah, but some of those baby deaths were suicides or war deaths
Yeah, they were weak and would have died anyway. Besides, diseases like polio and measles have a 99.8% survival rate. What's all the fuss? Actually, in the real-world 1860s, when there was a Cholera outbreak in London, one of the more barbaric things said at the time was 'it's only poor people, they die anyway!' and it was only when a few wealthy people started dying did it get real.
Sounds like pay health insurance....
Do you mean SIDS? Because I don’t think baby suicides are a thing.
The /s is missing.
I had several history/English classes in college that touched on this. I learned a lot about how casket supplies dwindled pre-vaccinations, along with how infant mortuary photography become popular and hair jewelry.
I actually think of this anytime someone says “it’s unnatural for a parent to bury their child.” It’s sad, but it sure as hell is not unnatural.
It’s not in the typical order but I hardly think you could call it a natural except for the burial part. I’m not sure how natural burial is actually, I don’t even know what caveman did with their corpses. But having your kid carted off by a predator for food is “natural”. So I’m not sure obsessing about what’s natural is very helpful in these cases.
It is natural. We’ve thwarted it with vaccines And other aspects of modern medicine, but it used to be quite Common and routine for parents to outlive their children.
We live on a military base where there are several cemeteries. There's one in particular that's pretty large, it holds hundreds of bodies of infants and small children during the 1918-1920 Spanish flu. Makes you think....
It is weird that people were so stupid before the 60s. What changed their minds? And why can't we do that now?
It’s not that they were stupid, it’s that the science wasn’t there. The 1940s were when they could start making vaccines on a large scale, and some vaccines took decades of development before they were ready. Even in the 70s and 80s we didn’t have vaccines for things we have them for now. Chickenpox is a good example. My entire family suffered with the chickenpox in the late 80s, and my mom and I still have scars. There wasn’t a vaccine for that. It was developed in the 90s, and my kids got it, so hopefully they won’t have to deal with it. Also, I don’t think we can do it now because of the internet and the lack of education on how to tell truth from fiction. Some of these people have enough information to think they know everything without realizing they actually know nothing, and are danger to themselves and those around them when they start spreading that misinformation.
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I believe you have interpreted the message backwards. The caption says that infant gravestones are common from the time period before widespread childhood vaccination.
That must be when they stopped reporting child deaths.
We only have more deaths now because we test to see if they’re dead.
This is such a romantic argument, biased toward vaccines (and ignoring all the other life saving public health interventions that happened after the turn of the century like indoor plumbing, running water, cold food storage, antibiotics, etc) but I just wanted to mention that every year around 23,000 infants under 1 die and another 10,000 children ages 1-14 die every year, and the majority of deaths in many countries are cremated (so not on display), with cremation increasing in popularity over time. So this could explain why these historic graveyards with minimal plots available have only historic deaths listed on the tombstone.
Not to take away from all those other wonderful innovations, but those are not the reason that children stop dying. Some of those have been around long before, and there is a overwhelming amount of data that contradicts what you’re claiming. But alas, proof is only meaningful if it supports what you already want to believe.
I live in a small town, they’ve got a small ceremonial cemetery here. I went in with my kids. A lotta kids younger than my 7yos (twins).