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the middle ages were a lot more than 100 years ago; or are we taking relativistic effects into account, for some reason?
Today most people in the developed world do not know someone who wasn't ill with something else who died of an infectious disease you could catch anywhere. For example the common flu kills thousands every winter, but most of the people who die of the flu are elderly or have a serious illness that makes them more vulnerable like cystic-fibrosis. It's very rare for someone who is a healthy 45 year old to get the flu and die.
People talk about how the life expectancy at birth in 1900 in the US was 46. There is a wrinkle hidden in that data because of how prevalent deadly infectious diseases were then. If you look at life expectancy at age 5, it jumps well into the 60s. It was very common for every family to lose at least one child before age 5 from a disease that hits very few people today (or extinct like small pox).
The environment people lived in, knowing someone who got suddenly sick and died, especially a small child, was pretty common. The 1918 flu pandemic was an unusually bad outbreak, but other diseases we get inoculated for as children today were part of the background noise killing people at a steady rate.
Common bacteria infections took a lot of people too. My mother went through nursing school in the late 40s/early 50s when antibiotics were just becoming common in civilian use. She said her course on bacterial infections was particularly difficult to square the textbook with the reality she was seeing in the hospital. She had to do a paper on a particular pathogen and the textbook said the fatality rate was near 100%. She had to do a case study on a patient and the kid she was studying was bouncing off the walls with boredom because all signs of the infection were gone.
As soon as the course ended she chucked the textbook in the trash. It was completely useless.
In the 1950s on two separate occasions he was working on a project with someone on Friday and found out on Monday they had developed polio over the weekend. In one case the guy he was working with died very quickly and in the other case the guy ended up in an iron lung.
My father was always out on the end of the bell curve with his immune system. He got none of the childhood diseases his peers got. In WW II his unit was sent to New Guinea and the Philippines. He came back in the spring of 1945 and the other half of the unit that had been stateside was being send to the Aleutians. One guy came down with an appendicitis just before shipping out and they had to replace him with someone who had just come back from the Pacific. My father and one other guy were the only two that didn't have some tropical disease.
Only the oldest among us lived through a time when highly infectious diseases were killing people they knew. When people are dumped into a dangerous situation that is related to other things they have been through, they adjust more easily than someone who has never experienced anything similar. When people are thrown into a completely new situation, quite a few will develop PTSD.
Guess I can afford to add on that FSD for $3k now, to support his continued lunacy. Somehow I don't really feel like it though. 
