Those who fancy that they would relish life in a bygone era assume that they would arrive in the earlier milieu with all the health, wealth, and social status needed to enjoy their visit

Needless to say, those who fancy that they would relish life in a bygone era assume that they would arrive in the earlier milieu with all the health, wealth, and social status needed to enjoy their visit. Nobody would wish to find himself an Irish peasant during the Famine of the 1840s, or a medieval serf, or a slave in the Athenian silver mines at Laureion. Actually, if one were translated to the body of such a dweller in former times, chosen at random, one would be hundreds of times more likely to find oneself a downtrodden proletarian than a baron or an Athenian eupatrid, because the affluent in those days were such a tiny fraction of the whole. For that matter, such a translation would drastically cut one’s life expectancy, because there were so many illnesses and injuries that in those days were fatal.

L. Sprague deCamp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976), loc. 485