Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 125 of Charles King’s 2024 book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah:

Early-childhood mortality was so expected, in fact, that in official documents “infancy” was itself understood to be a cause of death distinct from infectious diseases such as consumption and smallpox. Four of Susannah Cibber’s five siblings, for example, had died while infants, as had at least two of her children.