No, I said hair dye was for the better off - the poor didn’t bother with it because there were so many other things taking priority and/or better ways to spend money. Maybe for something like a wedding, but otherwise no.
One thing we don’t see nearly as much of now are occupational circumstances that significantly change the body (well, I suppose now everybody has secretary butt?) - seamstresses used to get horrible eyesight from strain as well as arthritis in their hands, etc.
There’s that. Many people until recently had to do severe manual labour. Beyond a certain point, that stress hurts the body - arthritis, etc. Stress causes secondary problems - heart problems, weak immune system, etc. As you get older, these stresses make it difficult to fight infections, etc. When food was expensive, malnutrition and starvation aggravated the stress. Plus, there’s sanitation - you’re less likely to catch diseases if you are not crowded with others in an environment where you are exposed to disease.
So even if the childhood diseases and adult problems did not kill you, if you had a hard life you likely had problems later in life. As you get older, your immune system, ability to fight and recover form diseases, becomes worse. if you are not optimum, you are more likely to succumb. Each bout makes the next one easier.
Survival was like a lottery, or maybe a league play-off. If you won the first round, you then had to win the next round and so on. Modern medicine has just made it so much easier to win every round.
I think that Pope Benedict will be remembered for the one massive massive change he brought to the catholic church. Until recently, even the best medical care meant that once a person got fairly old, they were likely to succumb to the first major disease that hit them. Today with antibiotics and oxygen feeds and such, old people can hang on for a decade or two long after their ability to work hard has gone. It took real guts to recognize this and defy centuries of tradition for the pope to decide the job should stop when the occupant felt they could not do it any more - rather than a church run with a decade or so of busy work followed two decades of passive inaction waiting for a funeral.
If you want a real difference between old people now and old people then, look at how the Vatican has worked. There’s a line going back well over 1,000 years of people generally NOT physically stressed and how they survived.
Look at this list List of popes - Wikipedia
See how quickly you start to see popes dying in 70’s or 60’s - something you don’t expect today unless the person already has chronic medical issues (or suddenly gets cancer). Plus, we can often diagnose things like heart problems well before they manifest as a serious medical event.
This chart gives 1940 expectancies as 60.8 (male) and 65.2 (female).
This one gives more complex analysis.