We’re living long enough for cancers to take hold, that seems clear.  But heart disease hasn’t mushroomed in the same way.

We’ve just cut away most of the other killers via vaccinations and medication so it stands out.

Our previously steady increase in life expectancy has stalled and may even be reversed 

In my looking at the issue (pouring over census data and trying to correct for things like wars  in order to engage an acquaintance MD in discussion) — ie., slightly informed but not rigorous — it looks like we actually hit the knee of the curve around 1950, at which time we started spending more and more (approching exponential) for less and less. One can always posit some kind of black swan or deus ex machina that will sweep away even the the concept of death, but the data actually suggest that, lacking such an intervention, we’ve been laboring under diminishing returns for over 60 years.

In other words, if the Divine Singularity doesn’t show up, we’re all going to die (statistically speaking) about when we could be expected from current conditions, give or take a few years. Sorry Ray.

Yes I’m lazy, you want fact checking?  DIY.

while we’re being morbid, here’s a suicide fun fact: in Japan, the suicide rate much “higher” in part because police very often categorize as suicide murders that don’t have an evident perpetrator. (they don’t like to have “open” cases over there, it mucks with their high-90s success %.)  so they often won’t risk it: if the case looks dubious, why not just chalk it up to suicide.

This is consistent with what I understand as the major cause of suicide, which is social isolation. In the past, large families and closer social ties with friends and coworkers made it harder for an individual to become isolated. Today it is trivially easy. This is also consistent to why the developed world has a higher suicide rate than the developing world. More money spreads people apart, less money brings them together.

People have already commented on some of this…

 Of course all the suicides are being lumped into accidents in the 1900 stats. Suicide was COMPLETLY taboo, religiously and socially, in many parts of the world in 1900. It still is of course, but it was then very much the case in Europe and North America. Suicide meant you were denied normal burial…which, to overwhelmingly religious families, meant banishment from the afterlife/the comfort of your dead family FOR ALL ETERNITY. Loving families would lie through their teeth so that members could avoid this fate . All families feared…quite rightly…the taint of suicide, and would have lied to preserve surviving family member’s  prospects for marriage, employment and professional advancement.

I agree that cardiovascular disease and cancer are more common now. Some of that is surely our long, relatively safe, life. We avoid infection and trauma long enough to become prey to the slow killers. The 5300 year old ice man (Otzi) carried the signs of cardiovascular problems, so that health concern is nothing like new.

I think it’s important to remember that cancer was  greatly stigmatized in even the very recent past, so likely greatly underreported in 1900. It was badly understood, a “wasting disease”, and a source of social embarrassment. Some forms mimicked STDs, whether they were related or not, and the common notion of everything from mental health to promiscuity to criminality to chronic disease “running in families” meant people routinely hid all variety of problems, including long-term health issues, from public view and even from doctors.

I know of several cases in my Canadian extended family (both blood and in-law) where people denied or hid cancer until it killed them. I doubt these folks were unique to their time (the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s) and expect things were worse in the decades before. Autopsy was nothing like normal in 1900, so anyone whose cancer did not involve large, obvious tumours could easily have had their death attributed to something else.

Was childbirth lumped into accidents too? I know childbirth was getting safer toward the end of the 19th century, but expect it still claimed a significant number of lives in 1900. Was it too embarassing to discuss/document?

http://youtu.be/AuOB0hVOOXM