The 5 lowest rate survival jobs in history

It’s only been over the last 100 years that people have created any real health and safety standards, and workers rights are also a relatively new invention. Before the creation of enforced safety standards, the general rule was that if you were willing to risk the job, you’d get the pay, and with so many people desperate for money there was no shortage of those willing to risk their lives for the cost of a loaf of bread. Here are five of the hardest to survive jobs throughout history, but unfortunately people of the past weren’t the best when it came to keeping records of peasants who died in their professions, so we will never know a true fatality percentage.

1) Gong Farmer

Whenever a toilet became too full or the pile under the outlet of a castle lavatory started to get too high, it would be the job of the gong farmer to come along and sort it out. They would spend their entire day walking round with a wheelbarrow and shovel, digging out the collection chambers from all the toilets and cesspits in the area. It was common for people to use human waste on their crop fields when animal manure wasn’t available, so the gong farmer would walk back and forth all day dumping mounds of crap onto a field somewhere. They would also be expected to provide their own clothes and do it all year round, even on the hottest summer days. It goes without saying that disease would be the number one enemy of the gong farmer and in a time when antibiotics didn’t exist, it became a very risky job.

2) Plague doctor

Recognized by their distinctive bird-like masks, the plague doctor would travel round and try to treat people infected with the bubonic plague. The problem was that their patients needed advanced medicines that didn’t exist at the time, and all treatments the doctor had would do little to nothing, and often made things worse. It only takes a single bite from one flea to become infected, so spending your time visiting as many sick people as possible, so you can make them feel slightly better before they died must have been very dangerous.

3) Pirate

The average life expectancy for an experienced pirate was no more than 4 years. There are a few that managed to escape or hide for the rest of their lives, but the most well known and dangerous were always caught. When you start annoying the most powerful nations on earth and stealing their goods, you can expect bad things to quickly come your way. All it took was a substantial bounty or a load of troops hiding on the right merchant ship, and a pirate’s career is over.

4) Miner

Miners were often either slaves or the lowest people in society, as no one who could help it wanted to be a miner. Companies would sometimes offer payment in the form of commission, with miners only getting paid for the amount they extract, which was an attractive prospect for someone with no money. The mines themselves were extremely dangerous, and with no equipment to detect water or gas deposits, miners would simply keep hacking away until there was no more ore left. Tunnel collapses were the main killer, followed by gas poisoning from undetectable sources, like carbon monoxide poisoning which doesn’t have a smell or taste, so before you even know it’s there it’s already too late. In later mining operations, they would take a canary in a small cage into the mine with them, because when large amounts of CO2 are present, the bird will panic and alert the miners.

5) Petardier

During the medieval and renaissance periods in France, it was incredibly dangerous to be a soldier, but no position within the army shared the insanely low survival rate of the Petardier. It was their job to move containers of gunpowder next to an enemy fortification and prepare it to either be shot or light a fuse themselves. Gunpowder weapons were very simple during this period and bows were still widely used, so there was a whole range of things to get shot by while doing your job. The containers needed to hold enough powder to blast through a castle wall, so were generally very heavy and took 2 to 3 men to carry them. The Petardiers were also equipped with heavy plate armour, as they were the number one targets for every single person in the fortification they were attacking. If you managed to carry your 50 kg chest of gunpowder 200 meters in heavy armour without a single one of the defenders shooting you, then all you have to do is light a fuse and run all the way back without getting shot or blown up from your own explosives.