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[Darvi]

I heard of a guy who had 18 kids. Legitimate ones. Plus however many bastards. I think all of the legitimate ones survived until adulthood too.

By great-grandad was pimpin'

[Aqizzar]

My Spanish teach in highschool always talked about her family and her husband's in Mexico.  Her mother was the youngest of twenty children, and one of only two to survive childhood.  Every time a child would get sick, abuelo would go to the barn and start building a coffin, because they knew full well that they probably wouldn't survive.

I find it equally amazing how modern an idea it is that a person's chance of living to adulthood is so likely as to be taken for granted, and how rarely this is ever mentioned.

[Kogan Loloklam]

around 2.5% mother mortality is what I found of Roman Childbirth when I went looking, with around 33% for the infants. I don't remember the exact source or number, but mothers survived childbirth pretty well. Modern medicine shot it up bigtime for a bit, before dropping it well below 0.1% today.
The first child usually was the most dangerous one, because of lack of experience combined with less developed bodies.

Urban societies have traditionally had low birth rates.  The Roman empire actually faced this problem enough that official government measures were taken against it.

[Muz]

Oh, and note that before automobiles, you had horses. Which meant a LOT of horseshit, literally ankle deep in it in many major cities (e.g. New York). As much as people hate cars today, cars are an environmental savior.

Before I go off in a rant here, do you mean "literally" as in literally or as in "exaggerated for effect"?

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/

Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).

literally