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Good old days ... weren't!

Just came across a study of Union war vets that caught my interest because I was there when it was being done.

Must have been 15-20 yrs ago, I was researching my own ancestors, and saw a researcher with a huge stack of files. Turned out she was performing part of the study. In the 1880s, as part of administering the first big pension system, the government created uniform reporting forms for the vets' health. Nobody knew much of medicine then, so vets put in for pensions any time their health turned bad -- it must have been related to all the illnesses they had in service, the months in the Richmond swamps, etc. Nat'l Archive had something like a million records, a database on 19th century health to be found nowhere else in the world.

The study outcomes indicate that early disease predisposed people to everything, including even cancer. Heart disease was much more common (probably heart valves ruined by rheumatic fever). Ditto with back problems (hard labor). Not only were lifespans shorter, chronic and disabling illnesses set in earlier.

And those were people healthy enough to enlist... 1/6 of potential recruits flunked the medical, at a time when almost anyone who could walk was being taken. (Once read a complaint from commander of II Corps that he'd been sent men who were "congenital idiots," men who had one leg visibly shorter than the other and could barely walk, etc).