[lit-ideas] Re: remebering 1906
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:54:08 -0800
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used
borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Weird. My mother was born in 1900. I never heard her, her sisters, or
her mother refer to this curious ritual. Borax? Borax? It may be that
women used egg yolks on their hair. Women are unpredictable, of course.
Five leading causes of death were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
A more modest claim would be that these were the five leading reported
causes of death. Even so, one might wonder if the reports were
accurate. One might have reason to question their accuracy given the
apparent lack of competent doctors. So, if
Ninety percent of all doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were
condemned > in the press AND the government as "substandard."
one might be sceptical about the accuracy of this list of leading
causes of death.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.
Murders were seriously uhere in the early part of the 20th C.
Interestingly, perhaps, reporting became more reliable in 1907 and
afterwards. A 1995 article in the journal Demographics gives a figure
of 869 for 1906. That is still a remarkable number given what we're
accustomed to. (The Demographics article is available to me on JSTOR,
which has frustratingly made its articles uncopyable. I'll send a pdf.
of it to anyone who SERIOUSLY wants one. Lots of formulae in it, so if
you don't know statistics parts of it will be opaque.)
Robert Paul
Born at home, and proud of it
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