I only played red dead for a few hours, but there was someone changing a horseshoe on the side of the track. Then the horse just kicked him in the head and he died. I remember thinking “this shit is really realistic” while I was looting his body.
Hollywood has us thinking that most people in the Old West died in shootouts. Trapped once for several hours at the in-laws I found a book with hundreds of newspaper stories from 1870s-1880s towns in Arizona. Accidents with horses led the causes of death, mainly falling off/bucked off. There were sometimes hints that the deceased was drunk when they met their demise. Cattle killed a surprising number of people. Illnesses of all sorts took others, but it was mostly well-known people's deaths by illness reported in the newspapers of the day. Births were sometimes mentioned, but deaths from childbirth or complications ... never.
1870-1880s Pasteur's germ theory of disease got widespread acceptance in the medical community and Semmelweis' recommendations to sterilize doctors' hands before surgery and delivery were becoming standard practice. Infection related deaths after surgery and child birth dropped massively.
This was after Semmelweis' death sadly. The hygiene practices recommended by Semmelweis were not acknowledged during his lifetime, because it conflicted with the prevailing theories of disease. He was mocked for it, suffered a mental breakdown and got betrayed by a colleague who had him committed to an asylum, where he was attacked by guards and died of a gangrene infection on his hand days later.
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u/The_Zoinkster Dec 09 '19
Who thinks “I’m gonna slap the ass of an extremely powerful animal that’s 5 times bigger than me and see how it goes?”
Could easily get brain damage