[HN Gopher] Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain ___________________________________________________________________ Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain Author : Petiver Score : 25 points Date : 2023-09-20 04:53 UTC (18 hours ago) (HTM) web link (dralun.wordpress.com) (TXT) w3m dump (dralun.wordpress.com) | A_D_E_P_T wrote: | Travel is still risky. Automobile accidents are, by a substantial | margin, the leading cause of death in young people. | | It may have been somewhat more risky back then -- in terms of | fatalities per mile traveled, if not fatalities per hour traveled | -- but I don't think that's perfectly clear. A fall from a horse, | which has happened to me more than once, is a lot less injurious | than an automobile accident. It would be interesting to see a | comparison table. | | Besides, the risks didn't stop every enterprising English and | Protestant German youth from embarking upon the Grand Tour: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour | nugget wrote: | I'm pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of | death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from | fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn't like to cover | it and the Government doesn't like to talk about it. | kunwon1 wrote: | One might argue that a fall from a horse in the 17th century is | more injurious than an automobile accident in the 21st | AlbertCory wrote: | we don't have much data for then, but we do have it for now. | See my other comment. | bbarnett wrote: | A fall from a horse, with mild injury, was far more serious | though. | | No antibiotics, and geneally no operating for internal body | cavity injuries. | bemusedthrow75 wrote: | s/enterprising/independently wealthy/ | [deleted] | AlbertCory wrote: | I don't have a dog in this fight, honest! /s | | but I got curious, so as a fun math exercise: go crazy! | HORSES: | | https://horsesonly.com/horse-riding-accidents/ | | > According to the research (2002) on horseback riding danger | statistics, the rate of hospital admissions for equestrians is | 11.8/1000 riders or, assuming one hour per day riding on | average, 0.49/1000 hours of riding. (1) | | > 7. 81% of equestrians get injured at some point in their | riding career. CARS: | | https://www.valuepenguin.com/car-accident-statistics#injurie... | | we have some numbers that don't quite compare: | | >In 2020, Americans had a 1 in 63 chance of getting in a car | accident. | | > At least one driver or passenger is injured in 43% of car | crashes. There were 2,282,015 injuries reported in 2020 -- | that's 6,252 per day, or four per minute. | thmsths wrote: | So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses? And | that's without accounting for the difference in distance | travelled. The number of injuries for the car are | staggeringly high because of how common they are. I bet if we | enacted policies that made owning a horse as likely as owning | a car, we would also find that every minutes a several horse | riders get injured. | A_D_E_P_T wrote: | > So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses? | | Well, all of that refers to injury -- which may be serious, | but may also be very mild. A sprained ankle is an injury. | Horseback riding is a lot like a contact sport; it's very | easy to pick up musculoskeletal injuries from getting | pulled or thrown (or kicked, which has also happened to me | once,) but only a very small proportion of those lead to | serious and lasting disability. | | If we look solely at fatalities, a different picture might | emerge. Automobile injuries are, I surmise, more likely to | be very serious or fatal. And, of course, motorcycles are | in a different plane of existence entirely. | pixl97 wrote: | I would also make a guess that cars operated at the same | speed (with current safety equipment) that cars would be | closer to 100 times safer than horses. The entire velocity | squared multiples quickly. | thmsths wrote: | I think so too. Motorcycles are the closest thing we have | to a very fast horse and according to [1] they are 35 | times more likely to result in a fatal crash than a car. | | [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-20 23:00 UTC)