This thing that is constantly repeated drives me nuts.
I just wanted to put this thread here, possibly the wrong board. This statement gets repeated in every time travel thread and generally ANY thread dealing with life prior to the 20th century. Average life expectancy was low because of a high number of people who died in infancy or early childhood. People who reached adulthood were not dropping dead of old age at 39 or 40.
Why won’t this misconception die??
Because most people don’t really understand the concepts of statistics and averages. Also, because the past is more interesting if it is different from the present, so it is more fun to believe people died young.
There is a record of these figures called British Historical Statistics, you can do a google search on it if you wish, that provides all sorts of stuff, one part shows mortality by age group per thousand.
Infant mortality consistantly runs at just over 20% for most of the 19thC - the striking thing is that the overwhelming majority of these are between 0-4 years old.
I have come across material that states the average lifespan for the landowning groups was 44, and this descends as you go down the various social classes to lower than 27 for trades workers and less than 20 for labouring classes.(about provision of water and sewerage systems in 1840)
Those latter figures were derived from a pioneering report by Edwin Chadwick in 1842 called 'The Sanitary condition of the working classes and this was actually based upon research carried out by Robert Baker in Leeds who came up with what was then a completely differant way of mapping out mortality and illness - which has variants that are in use today.
These mortality figures are not uniform, they are worse in cities such as Manchester, London and Bradford and slightly better than other cities that were less industrialised.
This is well worth a read for those interested in historical social issues.
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/chadwick2.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PHchadwick.htm
The figures would fit even better if you take particular years when cholera pandemics was more common, along with scarlet fever whooping cough and the worst of all - measles.
During the mid to late 19thC it was possible to insure yourself against incapacity through illness and short term unemployment through Friendly Societies, however, once you achieved 40 years old, you were considered too great a risk and could not purchase this types of protection.
As a summary, if the speaker knows what they are talking about they can make a good case for that claim you seek to deny, to select industrialised towns during the industrial revolution and to then select particular social classes, (ie the overwhelming majority of the poulation) then this claim is not far from the truth.
Like lots of claims, there is a kernal of truth, in this case a very large one.
Some further reading for you,
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/publichealth/sources/source5/mapofleeds.html
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/bwho/v83n11/v83n11a17.pdf
Not forgetting
If you choose to read the latter, I suggest you download the .pdf rather than read it on google books.
You are simplifying things too. Yes it is low because of infant mortality. But it is also true that many adults who would survive today died of common ailments. A bad tooth could kill you. A cut could kill you. Many diseases which are survivable would kill you. My grandmother died in the 30s of a kidney problem which would be curable today. A great Aunt died from appendicitis. The fallacy is that when people hear about the life expectancy they think that our ancestors never saw an old person. Seeing someone in their 70s was not rare. But people dying in their 30s and 40s was more common than today.
According to the figures, during the 19thC it was indeed rare for some folk to see people above 70 years of age.It would have been rare to see someone at 50 years age.
When you look into the social backgrounds of the majority of the population in the UK you will see that their lives were crowded, unsanitary and limited in contacts across social groups.
If you were a worker living in industrial revolution Britain, you would not have mixed with the social classes who might live to greater ages (there is every chance you would not have even seen them) - your scope would have been very limited, and as one of those workers, you would have formed the majorityof the population.
Life expectancy in the UK during the late 17thC and through most of the 19thC was probably at its lowest than at any other period.
Given the right years and the right social class, you can make a good case for the point in the OP that is being denied, those who lived longer are almost the exception that proves the general rule.
I expect that those who make the original contention do not know these facts, and are making a sweeping generalisation but I also think that nowadays we also have some ‘golden age’ view of history, especially those British imperialists who look back on the days of empire - fact is, life was extremely hard not just for the populations of foreign lands that Britain exploited, but for the majority of British residents who were exploited just as much, and on occasion worse.
As far as the overwhelming majority of the population is concerned, the longer lived individuals were irrelevant - those aged persons were rare and didn’t come into contact with them - those longer lived people were at the far end of the Bell curve.
I could also distort the information, by saying that people lived to 70 years age and simplify this by not mentioning any of the previous part of my post.
When you look at statistics you have to decide what is relevant and from what point of view, from the point of view of the majority of the population, and from the point of making a case for clean water, sewage, health & welfare then the lifespan of 40 years or less is reasonable, because it is largely, though not absolutely, correct - statistics works like that, you often do not get absolutes
If you go to other nations, you may well get differant results.
Because we only use 10% of our brains 
It hasn’t reached 40 yet.
Because they didn’t use birth control…?
Right. Reminds me of the statistician who drowned in a pond which had an average depth of only two feet.
When I was young, I had heard this statistic about life expecency, but when I went through some old graveyards, I was astonished at how many people in the 19th and even 18th century had gravestones showing they lived into the 70s and even 80s.
I also noticed the very large number of stones showing infants and youngsters who died back then. Then a light went on.
Most people also don’t think about the fact that until quite recently big cities were literally unsustainable - they required fresh blood from the countryside because their death rates outweighed birth rates. So if you lived in the cities, you’d know an unhealthier population than if you lived on a farm.
And sanitary conditions actually were worse in big cities than in smaller places (as has been stated in one of the previous posts), plus they worsened during the industrial revolution.
“Average” could be the mean, median, or mode.
A lot of people died in infancy (or childbirth) and other things that we have under control today. As posted upthread, something as simple as a burst appendix would have killed a lot of people. If you believe the TV program “Head of the Class,” it wasn’t until around the US Civil War that some doctor had the bright idea of washing his hands when going from surgery to surgery. If that was state of the art medicine, imagine the ignorance of the general populace and how long enlightenment probably took when even radios and newspapers weren’t all that common.
It must have been an obstacle course, hoping this childhood disease or that didn’t kill you. Then in your teens, you’re a man working in dangerous conditions or called off to war; or you’re a woman, rolling the dice with childbirth. If the flu pandemic passes you buy, the Great Depression may not. WWI, WWII…not exactly natural causes, but just as dead.
I doubt this is an inverted bell curve, with death rates huge in early life and then in late life. There were probably many spikes along the way during particular stages of life and during particular periods in history.
I’d like to think 40 years was the mean because (oversimplified) that would mean for each 1 year-old who didn’t make it, there’s an 81 year-old that did. But I doubt that: it would mean as many people lived to very old age. I don’t think it’s the mode, either…the most common age at death was probably very young. Sez Wikipedia:
*For example, the worst U5MR is 284 in Sierra Leone[citation needed]. (That is, 28% of all children born die before they turn 5 years old.) *
Interestingly (?) enough the same article says:
*The most common cause of infant mortality worldwide has traditionally been dehydration from diarrhea. *
I’d guess 40 is the median. Half died before 40; half died after. How much before or after is the question.
Things can get even more scewed when you realise that there were plenty of miscarriages, and deaths that were not registered - an unregistered newborn would not have to be baptised to be buried in consecrated ground and this would save money both on burial and baptising - so there was plenty of incentive not to register such a death.
Take a read on a book called 'To prove I’m not forgot which is an authorative publication on death in Victorian England.
Also remember that there was often a tendency to exagerrate age, in many cases fathers passed their same names to their sons, and when dad died, his death was not registered, the named son would simply take over the identity - this had a number of advantages, such as entry fines and duties. (sons usually followed fathers into the trades)(if you were a tradesman you had to pay a fee to take over an existing business - called an entry fine)
The more interesting thing, I think, is that our maximum life expectancy hasn’t changed much at all. Even in ancient times there was the occasional person who lived to be just over 100, and it’s the same today.
Ed
Cuz people are ignorant and lazy.
Does anyone actually know for sure what the lifespan distribution of people in the 19th century really looked like? As some in this thread have pointed out, the quality of the statistics on the topic are very much worse than than the statistics we have now. There are plenty of highly accurate actuarial tables which can precisely describe how long we we’re living now, but back then not every (or even a majority) birth and death was accurately recorded so the fact is that we really don’t have an accurate description of the lifespans of people in the 19th century. Can anyone here point to a well researched and constructed Kaplan-Meir survival curve for people born in any year of the 19th century?
Given that, I’ll withhold my annoyance about the supposedly common ignorance of how long people lived in the 19th century.
Make that a 79 year-old to counterbalance.:smack:
More interesting information here:
During the Industrial Revolution, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The percentage of the children born in London who died before the age of five decreased from 74.5% in 1730-1749 to 31.8% in 1810-1829.[20]
Holy shit…almost 3/4 of kids didn’t make it to age five!
Public health measures are credited with much of the recent increase in life expectancy. During the 20th century, the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years; 25 years of which can be attributed to advances in public health.[21]
Antibiotics were a biggie, I’ll bet.
It’s interesting to me how modern parents have the incredible luxury of believing that it’s “normal” for their children to outlive them, and are so shocked and sort of “extra” wounded when a child dies. Of course it would be mean and iunnecessary, but I always kinda want to say “Yeah, well, welcome to the experience of pretty much every parent who ever lived prior to about 1900. You counted yourselves damn fortunate if you only lost one, versus every other one, or all!”
When they’re talking about advances in public health, I always think of vaccines.
Your problem Threemae is dependant upon the nation, or even the town and city you select. This is why you have to define whom you mean, where and when.
There are regional differances in the UK, and there are differant mortality cuases, for example in the Lancashire and Yorkshire towns of Northern England you’ll find lots of respiratory problems due to the cloth mills and coal mines, in the rural uplands of Scotland or the agricultural market towns such as Ripon you’ll find other problems.
Then, added to all that, is the quality of record keeping. Some of the best records are those of the clergy, however these simply do not reflect the mortality of the population at large. In some cases figures for boroughs are not comparable year by year because of boundary changes.
British Historical Statistics is probably one of your better options as it gives breakdowns by age - death rate per thousand and by region, but AFAIK not by occupation. You would need access to a University library, or be prepared to pay a significant wad to obtain a copy, it can be found on google books but you will need to be patient and persistant to get it into a usable format.
Despite all this, there is enough evidence to generalise that around 40 years was pretty much the limit for the majority of workers, and these were the majority of the population - some towns were much worse, Bradford for example was noted for being very bad for lifespan.
In the UK during the 20thC our records are very much better and lifespans have increased from around 45 for males in 1900 to around 75 for males in year 2000. We can take these as reasonably accurate.
Something worth bearing in mind is that the figures from 1800 to 1900 will be worse as public health reform was only enacted around 1842 and it took some years before the effects were felt, when comprehansive sewage and water supply systems were steadily introduced and these were ceretainly not fully inplace by 1900, it took another 50 years before anything like a modern service for water and sewage was properly operational in the UK, and another 20 years more than that before you could truly call it comprehensive.
Chadwicks reports published during the 1830’s onwards gathered some information about death rates and they certainly caused town councils to invest in such sanitary arrangements, pushed by the cholera outbreak of 1848.
Here is some more easily digested research that can be used to justify the 40 year expected lifespan at birth.
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf
look for pages 8, 9 & 10
I also must point out that lifespan and life expectancy are two differant things.
If you know what you are talking about, then yes, you can make a very good case for saying that life expectancy in the UK between 1700 through to 1880 was around 40 years for men. You can even make a case, though weaker, that the lifespan for UK males during this period was also 40, its true that some men lived longer, but not many in comparison to the population as a whole.
If you read the links I have posted then these will give you some idea of where to begin to look.