> And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today. So, your life expectancy at five, in England, as a male, in 1870 was slightly longer than it is now, which is an extraordinary statistic, slightly shorter then if you were a female.
So it seems to me that medicine's main contribution to life expectancy is for women (making giving birth much less risky) and for children. The rest of life expectancy gains probably is from gains in sanitation, clean water, nutrition, life/work conditions. It seems that the lives saved by antibiotics did't actually move the statistics by all that much, never mind all the other stuff medicine came up with.
Note: This isn't saying "there was no progress" (it comes from a professor of medicine after all, and obviously there was a lot of progress overall), it is about identifying the specific areas where progress was made, and what specifically lead to progress in what area. So you don't look at different groups and strata and not one single population number.
"It seems that the lives saved by antibiotics did't actually move the statistics by all that much, never mind all the other stuff medicine came up with."
According to the person you're quoting, that's because Victorians ate more good food, ate less bad food, and smoked less. Medicine got better at fixing us, but we got more inclined to break ourselves, so the needle didn't move much
The median may not have changed much, or even the age of the oldest. However,the distribution has changed significantly. Check out this chart of mortality curves from 1851 to a forecast for 2031. Mortality curves they have become much more "square" than they used to be.
My quote explicitly stated that it excluded children and women. What is included in that image? I assume it's everybody ("persons"), so I'm not sure why you want to use it as a counter-point to what I quoted. What I wrote already acknowledged the huge amount of progress for children and women. Of course the curve shows significant improvement when you include those groups. See my last paragraph in the comment you replied to.
The chart shows all persons, and all ages. You can see the decrease in child mortality at the left of the curve, and the relatively small change in the age of the oldest at the right part of the curve. In the central part you can see where the biggest effects have been seen, i.e. in the annual risk of death for all persons.
E.g. for the cohort born in 1851, and who survived childhood disease, there was an annual risk of dying between the ages of 20 to 60 that was very much greater than the same for the cohort born in 1931.
You are correct in that most of this improvement can be accounted for by improvements in treating and preventing communicable disease, and prevention of septicemia, including but certainly not limited to those acquired during childbirth, as well as better management of the birth process itself.
It's not the middle ages but Victorian Britain, so still before widely available modern medicine, but in this lecture (transcript available):
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-...
the professor mentions as an aside that
> And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today. So, your life expectancy at five, in England, as a male, in 1870 was slightly longer than it is now, which is an extraordinary statistic, slightly shorter then if you were a female.
So it seems to me that medicine's main contribution to life expectancy is for women (making giving birth much less risky) and for children. The rest of life expectancy gains probably is from gains in sanitation, clean water, nutrition, life/work conditions. It seems that the lives saved by antibiotics did't actually move the statistics by all that much, never mind all the other stuff medicine came up with.
Note: This isn't saying "there was no progress" (it comes from a professor of medicine after all, and obviously there was a lot of progress overall), it is about identifying the specific areas where progress was made, and what specifically lead to progress in what area. So you don't look at different groups and strata and not one single population number.