Speaking of Snow...
Was just reading this post about income inequality over at Brad DeLong's site where he mentioned the following:

I know of nobody who would want to live in 1900 or even 1950 (unless they could be in the upper upper class, and take along their own private refillable stashes of penicillin and tetracycline).

This weekend I was watching the History Channel series "Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way". The episode was about cocaine and it talked about its historical use in late 1800s and early 1900s. During the 1880s, cocaine was considered beneficial to baseball players and given to dockworkers to give them "pep". It was pretty much used in every kind of cough syrup or elixir, even Coca-Cola, as most people know. The medical establishment used it to treat Opium addiction. (Opium addiction, Heh!) It was only outlawed because the southern religious folks decided that when cocaine was used by black males it worked them up into such a sexual frenzy that they would rape white women. (Something tells me that wasn't the first time they used that argument to ban something.)

So I'm sure life was hard back then, but they had ways of dealing with it....