Life expectancy

“ The New York City tables for the period 1909 to 1911, for example, indicate that the probable span of life for children under five has been extended by about ten years since the earlier tables for the period 1879 to 1881 were prepared. The improvement in life expectancy continues until about age 35. From this age onward the expectation becomes reduced. In Massachusetts, the reduction in the expectation of life has occurred at an even earlier age. ”

“ These are diseases of degeneration. It is to our interest to reduce these diseases. Proper living will do it.
The life expectancy of people over fifty is even less than it was thirty years ago. Middle aged people die from diseases caused by bad habits, extended over a period of years. Therefore, these people should learn to live well if they would live longer. ”

“ Deaths from stroke have declined by 37 percent during the same period. These dramatic declines are a significant factor in the marked increase over the past decade in life expectancy for all Americans. ”

“ American experience in tables of mortality shows that of 100 persons at the age of 20, 53 will reach 65; 12, 70; at which time the average expectation of life will be 81⁄2 years. If we take 100 people at the age of 30, 53 will live to 65; 48 to 70. But this table was compiled half a century ago, although it is still used—to the great profit of insurance companies as expectation has greatly increased. Ten to fifteen years of life over sixty-five are assured to more than half all wage workers. ”

“ These tables were satisfactory in the evidence they gave of a material improvement in the average duration of life. In forty years so great a change had taken place in the condition of the people, that the decrease of mortality was from 1 in 40 to 1 in 56. They proved, also, to demonstration, the extraordinary difference between the longevity of men and women, a circumstance not hitherto known to a certainty, but one which was most important to the granters of annuities. ”

“ Statistics compiled over a period of a thousand years indicate the average death rate expectancy per thousand people; they have also demonstrated that only fifty per cent of our women are capable of bearing children ”

“ He tells physicians that it should be their great aim to grow old themselves and to be the cause of old age in others. The marked increase in the duration of life in recent decades has been almost entirely confined to its early stages. After 45 the decline in the death rate has been insignificant ”

“ I said no more; but, a few days afterwards, I went to him and very gravely told him that I had discovered the law of human mortality in the Carlisle Table, of which he thought very highly. I told him that the law was involved in this circumstance. Take the table of expectation of life, choose any age, take its expectation and make the nearest integer a new age, do the same with that, and so on; begin at what age you like, you are sure to end at the place where the age past is equal, or most nearly equal, to the expectation to come. ”

“ Let the ripe age be supposed of twenty-one years, and their period of life thirty-four years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons of twenty-one years of age. Each successive generation would, in this way, come and go off the stage at a fixed moment, as individuals do now. ”

“ The habits of order the system acquires in this period, continue to produce good health for many years afterwards; and hence bills of mortality prove that fewer persons die between forty and fifty-seven, than in any other seventeen years of human life. ”

“ To be tending towards death from five-and-forty seems to them ridiculous. So it would be as a matter of sentiment, among people who think about death in such an exaggerated way as we, of this age, do. But I am here speaking of the natural facts which bear upon the condition of old age; and that is my concern with forty-five. In a rough way, the physiological distribution of our life is set down as including five-and-twenty years of growth, five-and-twenty of decline, and twenty of maturity between them. ”

“ We shall thus have a third rate of increase, viz. a theoretical rate, which might be expected to have a real existence, were not only food always abundant, but also all wars, all diseases, and other causes in any way tending to diminish fecundity, or to extinguish human life before the completion of the natural term of longevity, to be utterly removed. ”

“ We have already enough such instances to suggest that senescence normally releases in healthy natures new motivations for the conservation of health and that if these are given their due expression and if all aging men and women came to realize that as the decline of life sets in they must be, more and more, not only their own hygienists but their own physicians, far more might be accomplished in many if not most cases than the world at present suspects. ”

“ An early bloom is too apt to presage an early decay; and though our mortuary statistics, thanks to the advance of medical and sanitary science, do undoubtedly show that [Pg 79] the average duration of life is becoming more and more extended, and that the Golden Age, in this respect, is before us rather than in the past ”

“ Life is growth; the retardation of growth is old age; and its cessation is death. “Senescence is at its maximum in the very young stages, and the rate of senescence diminishes with age” (p. 250) . The embryo in its earliest stages rushes toward old age at an almost inconceivable velocity, the new-born infant runs, the child walks rapidly, youth saunters, the adult mopes, and old age only crawls on toward death. In other words, the momentum of life given by impregnation at the age of zero is retarded—most at first and with a diminishing rate at every stage. ”

“ While the average age at death of the gentry and of professional persons and their families is forty-four, the average age at death attained by you and your families in many instances is only twenty-two, just one-half,—that is to say, comparing your condition with that of the professional persons, you and your families are deprived of one-half of your natural term of life. ”

“ Inquiries into the laws of health and disease, along with statistics, make it plain that premature decease is owing to a variety of preventable causes. We are gravely informed by Dr Farr, in his letter [1] to the Registrar-general of England, that the natural lifetime of man is a century! To die earlier than a hundred years of age is all a mistake. It is the fault of something or somebody or other that people die young. With a good constitution to start with, and due care in ordinary circumstances, life may be protracted to eighty, to ninety, or to a hundred. ”

“ In the whole country, the marvellous results which have been produced can be seen. Thanks to these laws, the rate of mortality has been lowered, the mean duration of life increased, the amount of sickness decreased. ”

“ So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between adolescence and senescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the descent while the ascent behind is still visible. ”

“ In 1924, in his report to Congress, Surgeon-General Cumming, of the Public Health Service, said fifty-six years was now the average span of life in America, and contrasted it with the sixteenth century when the average life was between eighteen and twenty years. So, you see, every time you celebrate your birthday you can also celebrate the improved sanitary conditions and new conquests of disease that mean you should live longer than you thought you would when you celebrated your birthday a year ago. ”

“ These more marked nodes in the unity of man’s individual existence are: (1) childhood, (2) adolescence from puberty to full nubility, (3) middle life or the prime, when we are at the apex of our aggregate of powers, ranging from twenty-five or thirty to forty or forty-five and comprising thus the fifteen or twenty years now commonly called our best, (4) senescence, which begins in the early forties, or before in woman, and (5) senectitude, the post-climacteric or old age proper. ”

“ In some cases, such extraordinary vitality may be possessed that health laws can be broken with apparent impunity, but it will usually be found that a vigorous constitution was developed in early youth from plenty of exercise. However, the failure to observe these important bodily requirements invariably means trouble before reaching the period at which old age begins.
Though the average of human life has been greatly increased through the decline in infant mortality, the death rate among men of middle age has more than doubled in the past thirty years. ”

“ This view so commonly held, that heredity is the chief factor in longevity is doubtless correct in general. But it is fatalistic and directly tends to lessen the confidence of hygienists and physicians in the efficacy of all their methods of prolonging life in the aged. There is, we think, good reason to believe that there is a great and now rapidly growing number of exceptions to this so-called law, cases in which by conformity to right rules of living, age has been increased many years beyond that which our forbears attained. ”

“ The people who lived to be old represented the disease-resistant strain of their generation and on account of their superior fecundity this quality is distributed largely throughout the population. “A very large proportion of each generation is sprung from a very small proportion of the preceding generation; namely, from the people who lived to old age. The members of the short-lived group come from the short-lived parents. The children of the long-lived parents are on the average stronger, more vigorous, and longer-lived than the children of others, and there were more of them per family.” ”

“ But this makes it all the more remarkable that notwithstanding the multitudinous circumstances which have tended to increase disease, the death-rate has been lowered to an amount already indicated, and life has been prolonged to an extent which has secured an increase in its average expectation of 10 or 11 years within the last thirty years. ”

“ Whatever number of years may be taken as representing the natural term of human life, whether threescore and ten or a century be regarded as such, we are confronted by the fact that only one-fourth of our population attains the former age, and that only about fifteen in one hundred thousand become centenarians. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the causes of premature mortality, but the conditions favourable to longevity, and the causes to which length of days has been assigned, are closely connected with its subject. ”

“ Our tables also permit us to get an approximate idea of the extent of selection by death among children in the first five years of life. The minimum of infant mortality is reached among those children whose parents have attained 85 years of age. ”

“ A man will die for want of air in five minutes; for want of sleep, in
ten days; for want of water, in a week; for want of food, at varying
intervals, dependent on various circumstances.
The average of human life is 33 years. One child out of every four dies
before the age of 7 years, and only one-half of the world's population
reach the age of 17. One out of 10,000 reaches 100 years. The average
number of births per day is about 120,000, exceeding the deaths by about
15 per minute. There have been many alleged cases of longevity in all
ages, but only a few are authentic. ”

“ They trick our natural mechanisms. That kind of thing is commonplace in medicine today. But our research is poised for the next level, to answer the question of how long we can actually live. So here's the argument. There's no reason the human life span has to be what it is. In some unhealthy nations the average citizen doesn't even reach sixty. ”

“ Recognizing the fact that the essential cells in our241 body are inherently capable under proper conditions of living indefinitely, the problem that confronts us is whether environment or heredity has most to do in determining the actual length of life. Pearl163 concludes that the death rate of the earliest period of life is selective, eliminating the weak and leaving the strong, and that inheritance is “one of the strongest elements, if not indeed the dominating factor, in determining the duration of life of human beings.” ”

“ Many think this means a gain in national vitality. This may be true for the younger age but the “gain has served to mask a loss of vitality at the older age periods. This latter phenomenon, a rising mortality in elderly life, is something almost peculiar to the United States.” In other lands this fall in death rate has been due not solely to the reduction of mortality in infancy and adult life, for most countries have improved their mortality at every age period. ”

“ Just so long, however, as there are no paid teachers to show how not to get sick, how to keep the physique and mind from tiring, the heart from growing weary and discontented, just so long will the average of life remain under 40 years and the grave-yards continue to be populated. ”

“ Insurance companies and benefit societies keep close watch of their members and they report that a person ten years old may now count on living to be sixty years of age. That is the average age, whereas a hundred years ago the average expectation [Pg 271] of life at that age was only fifty-three years. ”

“ He published a table of mortality, in which a distinction was made between the different ages, and the probable number of years of life for each given. The rate of mortality assumed for the middle ages approximates to that probably prevalent previous to the seventeenth century. ”