21 Comments

Actually, people often lived to a fair age - not as far as now, obviously, but not the comedians' "all dead by 35" trope. It depends how you calculate the average. I believe it is common to ignore infant (less than 5 years old) deaths, because childhood is so dangerous (so VACCINATE, PEOPLE). For example, Robert E Lee lived to 63, Sherman to 71, Beethoven 61. If you have all the childhood deaths, it pulls the average down. Possibly a good thing for the US health system - childhood mortality is above many Western European countries, so if that was counted your average life expectancy would be even further behind that of my socialist death panels NHS.

The thing is child mortality was huge, but the replacement rate was big too (no contraception, plus imperfect understanding of why a woman got pregnant, meant if you fancied a shag there was a good chance a kid would be on the way). This was the problem for women - pushing a parasite out of your body is dangerous.

Wonkettes may take some satisfaction in knowing the wives of rich men could be in more danger than the poor. If you were rich you had a doctor. Doctors had equipment put up the lady's va-jay-jay. Doctors didn't know about the transmission of bacteria, so they didn't sterilise equipment... Poor people had midwives - they didn't have all the flash equipment, so were less likely to transmit infection

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I must've been asleep when Chris Christie got his degree in epidimiology. Else why would he be pontificating about the subject of disease?

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Don't panic. I believe the Heroic Resistance against Big Government are trying to abolish mandatory vaccinations.

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God? Because he put that shit here for a reason?

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I've said it before - Obama should state that he intends to make eating faeces illegal, and will punish anyone found eating it.

I think the EU should say the same to UKIP.

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The makers of iron lungs?

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Nobody has any real idea what the mean age at death was before the twentieth century, because lack of data. Citing the survival of famous people is bound to be misleading, because in some cases they were famous BECAUSE they lived longer than average, and in others they may have lived longer than average because they were famous and thus well-off.

And, even then: you could also have mentioned Bach (65), Grant( 63), or Goethe (83); but on the other hand, Keats (25), Shelley (30), Chopin (39), RL Stevenson (44), or the six Bronte siblings (11, 10, 38, 31, 30, 29).

You'll notice a fair amount of TB in my young-death sample. That's because hundreds of millions of people died of TB before the vaccine was invented, and I was looking for easy examples. I assume the anti-vaxxers don't inoculate for TB, either.

Incidentally, I'm 67, and so the only person mentioned in either your comment or mine that I would admit lived to a "fair age" is Johann Wolfgang v.

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ISWYDT.

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The thing to remember here is that Jobs was a truly brilliant marketing guy. I suspect he thought he could reality-distort his way out of cancer. It had always worked before.

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No, no, that's for the mind control.

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I'm not sure. Is shame some kind of vegetable, like kale?

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Tell us more about this "balance" concept, Governor. And "choice."

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I won't rest until I know what Dr. Oz has to say on the subject.

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FEMA has some camps.

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There is a real opportunity for the Pro-Birth movement to get on board here. They can be the voice for Virus-Americans, for the trillions of viruses that may never get the chance to reproduce if the Obama administration and its radical Vacci-nazi agenda prevail.

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I'm sure all Republicans support balance and choice for women (except Kaci Hickox).

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