Grief before medicine: a father counting days, replacement names, hair under glass
In January 1658, an English diarist sat down and calculated the exact number of days his five-year-old son had been alive, just trying to process the fact that the boy was gone. Hey, I'm Salt. I'm Grace. So wait, the father actually counted the days? Like, he just tallied them all up?
Down to the day. His name was John Evelyn, and his diary entries from 1658 about his son Richard are agonizing to read. He tracked the boy's short life, he, um, listed all his little traits, and he wrote that his wife, Mary, was still weeping weeks later. That breaks your heart. But it also feels very normal, right?
Like that's exactly how parents would react today. It sounds obvious to us now. But for a really long time, a prominent historical theory claimed that parents in the past just didn't love their kids that much. You're kidding. I'm not.
There was a French historian named Philippe Aries, and in 1960 he published a book called Centuries of Childhood. His whole argument was that because infant mortality was so high back then, parents basically just shut down. So the idea was that you wouldn't attach to a baby because the odds were they wouldn't survive? Exactly. Aries argued that pre-modern parents kind of shielded themselves with indifference.
And that book was hugely influential. For decades, it was just the the accepted academic truth that early childhood was this cold, detached experience. But Salt, how do you even prove something like that? I have no idea. Did he have letters from people saying they didn't care?
He didn't. And I I think that's where the pushback finally started. In 1983, a historian named Linda Pollock published a book called Forgotten Children. She decided to actually look at the primary sources, so she went through diaries and letters from between 1500 and 1900. And what did she find?
She sort of systematically proved that high death rates didn't blunt parental affection at all. You look at the records from the people who were actually there, and the grief is just raw. Wait, going back to John Evelyn for a second, Grace. If the child—if Richard died in 1658, we're talking centuries before modern medicine. Child mortality was a daily reality then.
It was, and the diaries show they felt it every single time. It wasn't just the seventeenth century, either. Look at 1257. What happened in 1257? King Henry the Third and Eleanor of Provence lost their daughter Katherine.
She was only three years old. Oh, wow. And the Queen fell physically ill with grief. The royal couple commissioned this beautiful silver-and-gold tomb for her. You don't build a solid silver tomb for a child you view as replaceable.
Right. You don't get physically sick from the loss of someone you held at arm's length. It's wild that historians ignored that stuff for so long. Um, I think it was easier to look at the sheer numbers and sort of assume people had to adapt. But the way they adapted wasn't by caring less.
It was by building these incredibly intricate customs around their grief, especially later on. What kind of customs? Like wearing black? Yeah, but more personal than that. Some parents practiced replacement naming, where they'd give a new baby the exact same name as the sibling who just died.
Huh. Aries actually used that as proof they didn't care. He said it showed kids were interchangeable. But historians later realized it was the opposite. It was a way to keep the dead child's memory alive in the household.
That makes so much more sense. It's a memorial, not a replacement part. And the memorials got even more physical. Fast forward to the Victorian era. In 1861, Prince Albert dies, and Queen Victoria enters this highly public, very structured period of mourning.
And everyday families start channeling their own grief into these tangible objects. Oh, is this the post-mortem photography? Where they'd pose with the body? Yes, the daguerreotypes of children who passed away, often posed to look like they were just sleeping. But they also did hair jewelry.
Wait — what? They'd weave the deceased child's hair into rings or brooches, and you can still see them in museum collections today because the the hair gets braided into these tiny, delicate little knots and set under glass, and mothers would wear them every day to keep the child physically close to them. Okay, that's, uh, you're literally wearing a piece of them. It's a very visceral way to remember someone. It really is.
You see mothers writing in their diaries about kissing a locket of hair because it's all they have left. The pain of losing a child was always deeply, acutely felt, from royal courts to everyday families. So they were grieving just as hard, they just had a different visual language for it. Right. And as we look back at the delicate hair lockets and the agonizing diary entries of the past, you know, it leaves you wondering.
Why were we so quick to believe that our ancestors felt any differently about their children than we do today? Yeah. Thanks a lot for listening to Daybrain.
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