Sickness and Health

A while back here I posted an item on life expectancy, noting in that the common assumption that "people are living longer" is incorrect.  People aren't living longer, as I noted, but they aren't dieing as young from disease, illnesses and accidents.  That may seem to be a distinction without a difference, but it isn't.  The big change that yields the increase in life expectancy is created by a lot of people no longer dieing as young as they once did. As life expectancy is an average, that moves the average up. The fact that its moved so far up, shows the stunning level of progress on medical matters in the 20th Century.

That's probably obvious to everyone, but it's hard to appreciate unless and until you have first hand examples.  A variety of things has really pointed this out to me recently.

One is that I came across a photo of my father's father.  My own father died rather young in my view, he was only in his early 60s. But his father was only in his late 40s.  By my understanding, the cause of his death had to due with the results of high blood pressure, that most likely being a fatal stroke.  He was otherwise healthy, but at that time this simply could not be treated.  A co-worker of mine, in his 80s, once related to me that this is what had resulted in his own father's death at a relatively young age. 

The same condition, in a more famous example, lead to the early death of Col. Charles Young, one of the first black Army officers in the U.S. Army.  It's often been noted that he was medically retired at the start of World War One, with the common assertion being that this was due to prejudice, which it may have been.  He undertook an Ohio to Washington D. C. horse ride to prove he was fit.  He was ultimately brought back into the service and posted as the military attache to Liberia, where he did indeed die of a stroke at a relatively young age.

For that matter, most heart conditions undoubtedly went wholly undiagnosed.   People lived with them until they had a heat attack, and often that was fatal.

Recently some of my cousins have been looking at family history that I've been unaware of, and I've started to run across similar things in the stories they are uncovering.  One of my maternal g-great grandfathers, for example, died at age 52.  This was byproduct of rheumatic fever, which had weakened his heart, even though he'd recovered from the disease itself.  His wife, then in her early 40s, was pregnant at the time with her 12th child.  It must have been a nightmare of epic proportions for her, facing the death of her spouse with all support suddenly removed.  She lived on in to her 90s.

And, of course, it isn't just death in those years that we'd now regard as shockingly untimely.  Early death was common too.  One of the 12 children mentioned just above died as an infant.  My grandmother on my mother's side had her last birth result in a death of the child during the birth, a not uncommon experience at that time.  Continuing on, in looking at my mother's great aunts and uncles, one of them, the one she is named for, died in her late teens or early 20s in the 1918 flu epidemic that killed so many young people around the globe.

This doesn't even begin to touch on people who lived with injuries that we'd regard as debilitating but treatable.  By some estimates, conditions of this type afflicted the majority of American males over age forty, during the late 19th Century.  Some of these conditions ultimately lead to early death.   Perhaps most of those conditions contributed to that to some degree.  Even when they did not, living with a chronic conditions was a much more common situation for people then, as opposed to now.  Cataracts, for example, simply blinded people up until some point in the 20th Century. Even when I was a kid it seemed like cataract surgery, which is now fairly common, was a terrible ordeal for people who underwent it.  Here again, I'm aware that my maternal great grandfather was blind in his later years.  He lived well into old age, so the condition is likely attributable to macular degeneration or cataracts, both of which are treatable, in varying degrees, today.

Indeed, when all of this is considered its likely that almost everyone was much more impacted by disease than today.  This does not mean that some did not live well into their advanced years.  Many did. But for those who sustained serious injuries, and for the many who just became sick or debilitated due to one of many things, there was much less that could be done.  There are still many who are so afflicted today, and we can hope and pray that medicine advances to treat the many ailments that continue to plague us.  At the same time, the degree to which life has changed in this way is truly remarkable.  God grant that this change continues.