But We Live Longer Today

The media, medical community, academia, drug companies, schools, parents, and friends all chime in with the same mantra about how blessed we are that medicine extends our lives. People are as confident that medicine increases life span as they would be if they had a fistful of aces. But when everyone smiles and agrees, they are usually wrong and progress weeps.

The force field of “truth” surrounding this popularly held “but we live longer today” meme exempts the foundations of modern medicine from criticism regardless of their shortcomings. After all, if everyone gets to live into their seventies, on average, as opposed to dying in their twenties as a result of medical progress, what’s a few shortcomings? (That would, according to the previous chapter, require the word shortcoming to mean the equivalent of five jetliners of people dying each day from medical intervention, and at least ten times that number being damaged or maimed.)

Average lifespan (take note of the word average) was indeed shorter in the distant past. But why is the question. For one, life used to be staggeringly difficult. People weren’t pointing and clicking sitting at a computer back then; they were hunting, gathering, laboring, and were prey themselves. With the advent of agriculture, toiling in fields from sun up to sun down with little to eat but moldy, mycotoxin-laden bread during many seasons, was a sure trip to an early death. Life was impoverished and brutal, perhaps even making death welcome. In the early cities people lived in windowless huts, on dirt floors, and were under constant threat from starvation or from the elements. Even the aristocracy in the middle centuries, died at about age 20. The cause of shortened life had nothing to do with the absence of vaccines, cholesterol medication, or MRI machines. It had everything to do with the reality of nature and the brutality of trying to eek an existence out of the land without the advantage of modern inventions.

If today we toiled manually every day from the time we could walk, and were sustained with only meager insect-infested crumbs and rotten potatoes, we would not last long either, in spite of any modern medical measure. Infants, with their immature immune systems, would be particularly vulnerable and easily succumb to deadly disease. The ‘old’ (beyond about 35) would not have the resiliency and energy of youth and would succumb to the sheer stress of trying to stay alive. There would be no retirement or old folks’ homes. If today we lived in crowded, vermin-infested cities where people threw the contents of their bedpans out the window into the streets (a common practice then), if we believed disease was caused by demons, and if it was also a matter of piety to keep the vile body filthy (it was ‘sinful’ to bathe), we would be dying like flies at an early age too, no matter how much medicine and surgery was offered.

Pregnant moms weren’t exempt from the hard life, either. They toiled in the fields and would barely take a break to give birth. Mothers were nutritionally and immunologically debilitated and passed those weaknesses to their children. The meager and often toxin-laden diet they consumed did not make for the highest quality milk for the child either. As society advanced into the Victorian era, women found nursing inconvenient or just plain did not have time due to the daily drudgery.

The advice they got from the health experts of the time was to feed children the following recipe: baked flour, bread crumbs, a little sugar, and water boiled for up to five hours. They would feed this through a calf ’s teat stretched over a bottle and used for a “fortnight” (ten days).

Couple these circumstances with the total lack of public utilities and hygiene in an increasingly congested society and it’s no wonder infant death was astronomically high. Infant death was also a natural mechanism to decrease the drain on resources. In a similar fashion, wild animals will not reproduce or will produce stillbirths if the mothers are starving. High infant mortality was a part of life back then. It was not because the peasants could not whisk children off to the ER and ICU.

The average life span number that is increasing and being credited to medical advances is the average age at death of the entire population. If there is a population of two, and one dies at one year of age and the other at 80, then the average life span for that population is about 40. In pre-modern populations, early deaths for adults and infants, for the reasons cited above, would make the average lifespan very low.

Even in 1900 with all the advances that had accrued by then, the average lifespan was only 47. Today it is about 73. Why? Primarily because infant mortality has decreased by some fifteen-fold since 1900. Infants have fared better in modern times, as have adults, because of the ease of life, the ready availability of adequate and safe food, decreased physical stress and danger, and public hygiene created by utility infrastructure.

So yes, the average lifespan has increased, but note that modern medicine cannot lay claim to that success any more than a rooster can boast responsibility for a sunrise. It is a simple play on statistics, bringing to mind George Burns ’ humor, “If you live to the age of a hundred, you have it made, because very few people die past the age of a hundred.”

The delicious irony here is that the heroes of the average increased life span we now enjoy are food truckers and plumbers. Not quite as sexy as high-tech medicine, but true nonetheless. In the meantime, modern medicine attempts to take credit. Like a cheerleader taking responsibility for a team win, modern medicine just happens to be at the right place at the right time in history.

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, R.L. Wysong).