RT Journal Article
T1 The Promise of a Longer Lifetime
JF JAMA
JO JAMA
YR 2024
DO 10.1001/jama.2023.18284
VO 331
IS 18
SP 1598
OP 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.
RD 5/20/2024
UL https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.18284