
Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire (2019) - diodorus
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X18302600?via%3Dihub
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xixixao
I really wish we had more popular representations of the later empire. So many
people believe that today’s world where people visit and settle from all
around is something completely new and perhaps bad. Perhaps if they knew what
the Roman empire stretching from London to Palmyra looked like, it might amend
their perspective.

(And for anyone who’d jump on this: No, it wasn’t this mixing of peoples that
brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)

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classicsnoot
But it was a contributory factor, probably the most ubiquitous in the fall of
most empires.

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G8WyaX
Full:
[https://delong.typepad.com/rome.pdf](https://delong.typepad.com/rome.pdf)

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rwesty
Ancient Romans had a ritual of visiting the baths daily. Doing so helped them
reduce the spread of diseases. I remember learning in highschool latin class
that Greek medicine focused on curing diseases while Roman medicine focused on
avoiding diseases. If you were able to go back to Roman times you would find
that people were realitively clean and well fed, even the plebian class.

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yomly
Tangentially I was blown away to read that the age of the court officials
during the Ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period could allegedly go as high as
in the 70s which is pretty crazy for ~200AD

But supposedly disease was well contained in at court by the sparsity of
people for the given area because everything was so vast.

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juskrey
Pretty crazy is how modern scholars don't see a difference between average
lifespan at birth and at some age. Humans were always living up to 100,
conditional on survival until some age.

Moreover, to become court official, one had to reach some wisdom first, hence
the age

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truculent
“Some age” doing a lot of work here. Yeomen in 14th Century England who made
it to 20 years old still had a life expectancy of just 48-52 (depending on
when in the century).

Source: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living-
in-...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living-in-the-later-
middle-ages/07CF2C52840B2D0320A12B3B9ABCE65B)

P.187

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jbay808
Doesn't that mean that for each one that dies at 30, there may well be another
that dies at 70?

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truculent
Life expectancy is mean not median, and the median wouldn’t work like that
either.

Of course, some people loved to 70, I think there would be virtually no
circumstances where that would be expected (ignoring ad absurdum takes like
“age 69 and 364 days”)

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cephaslr
The paper seems to me to suggests that the Romans got sicker due to increased
exposure to virus and disease as they got more integrated, wealthy and
populous. Perhaps this was a hidden trend behind the fall of pre-industrial
age civilizations. "Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration
of their health"

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29athrowaway
Romans used lead to manufacture many everyday items, including plumbing
related infrastructure, resulting in exposure to lead contamination.

Lead reduces your cognitive performance and makes you aggressive.

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joe_the_user
A post of the full article would be nice

