"...how did we survive these things in the past?"
We seem to be in a different place, psychologically speaking.
In our world of 2012, every single human life is deemed to be precious. (I don't think it necessarily IS, even to the people stating that, but that's the public line.)
It seems that as we have made our world ever-safer, and insulated most people from the random vagaries that could harm/kill us, we have become ever more sensitive to the loss of a single person.
For much of human history, the bulk of a person's siblings (and there were often many) would have died before age 2. Today, a simple (natural) miscarriage is enough to send a woman into years of counseling for her loss.
For centuries, the penalty for piracy was death, pure and simple. If you weren't killed in being taken, you were promptly hung or thrown overboard. Now the world's navies operate on catch-and-release basis, giving pirates in Somalia medical treatment, food, air-conditioned comfort before returning them gently to shore.
Today we'll spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a single life - even if that life is 75+ yrs old and doesn't have much left to go anyway.
I'm reminded also of a public television documentary on the building of the Hoover Dam. This was a difficult, low paid job during harsh economic times. 112 men died in work conditions that were dirty and dangerous out of a workforce of approx 5000. This wasn't seen to be a scandal at the time, it just "was". (And in fact a casualty rate of 2% over that 5 year project would be comparable to the US fatality rate in Iraq over the past 5 years.)
The test pilots of the original space program were, as far as I recall, all combat veterans. All of them had a keen understanding both of risk, and the necessity of running it to make progress. I suspect there are many, many similar personalities today, but the political will to employ them - or even recognize the risks publicly - has simply vanished.
Does this mean we're more pussified, or does this mean that we're more thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate? The problem is that we've got no absolute yardstick that says "past this point you're going too far", and there's always political value in appearing more caring, more concerned for the welfare of any/everyone.
Again, I don't know if this is really how people feel, or how people believe they should publicly appear to feel. In my experience, when engaged individually, people are lot more measured in their concern for their fellow man (which is, I suspect, more like our ancestors). Locally there was a recent news story about a baby dying, and the public clamor was the absolute tragedy of the thing - when in fact the undercurrent from people with firsthand knowledge recognized that the mom was an habitual meth user who was probably so wasted at the time she couldn't help her child at all.
I suspect 50+ years ago, there wouldn't have been such a need to provide this veneer of compassion.