Like many others, any number of diseases might have gotten me in the pre-vaccine era, but maybe not. I contract bugs and infections very, very rarely, and generally get over them quite quickly. I’ve never been hospitalized, never broken any bones, never taken medicine stronger than Amoxicillin or Tylenol, except when I had a broken tooth pulled the day before my wedding (I took a relatively strong painkiller for 2 days because of that). It’s possible that strep throat might have cut me down in the pre-antibiotics era.
I suspect I probably would have ended my days blind from syphilis and run down by a pennyfarthing in the Stingaree. The late twentieth century offered me too few opportunities for decadent vice.
