Death ised to work differently in the past.
“another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates plant spring wheat (harvested in fall) and having their dying season in the winter. It’s not hard to see the agricultural cycle at work: harvests are quite variable, ample in some years and short in others. Peasant farmers have all sorts of ways to protect against this risk (we’ll discuss some of them in this series), but a poor harvest still meant belt-tightening and you didn’t wait for the food to run out to begin rationing. So if the harvest was poor, food for children and the elderly has to be limited (the working-age adults cannot be short-changed, they need to be fit enough to plant and bring in the next crop) starting at that harvest and so a few months later when the weather turns bad (too hot or too cold), the already malnourished elderly or very young begin to die. Not of starvation, but of this or that disease or infection which, had they been fully fed, they might have fought off.”