Provider: Silverchair
Database: AmericanMedicalAssociation
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TY  - JOUR
T1  - The Promise of a Longer Lifetime
PY  - 2024
Y1  - 2024/05/14
DO  - 10.1001/jama.2023.18284
JO  - JAMA
JA  - JAMA
VL  - 331
IS  - 18
SP  - 1598
EP  - 1598
SN  - 0098-7484
AB  - Modern hygiene has been described as the reaction against the old fatalistic creed that deaths inevitably occur at a constant rate. The study of vital statistics shows that there is no “iron law of mortality.” According to a report prepared for the National Conservation Commission fifteen years ago, statistics for India showed that the average duration of life there was less than twenty-five years. In Sweden it was over fifty years; in Massachusetts, forty-five years. The length of life is increasing wherever sanitary science and preventive medicine are applied. In India it is stationary. In Europe it doubled in three and a half centuries. The rate of increase during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was about four years a century; during the first half of the nineteenth century, about nine years a century; during the latter half of the nineteenth century, about seventeen years a century; and in Germany, where medical and sanitary science has reached the highest development, about twenty-seven years a century. The only comparative statistics available in this country are for Massachusetts, where life is lengthening at the rate of about fourteen years a century, or half the rate in Germany.
Y2  - 5/20/2024
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.18284
ER  -