Getting old

[hyphenate]

150 years ago, I would have been lucky to reach my 56th birthday. Now, it's in a little over a month, and I feel old!

I was thinking about that--a millennia ago, at 56, I would have been considered pretty old. I wouldn't be considered only 2/3 of thr way through my life, and if I had been a mother, odds are I could have had as many children as the Duggars, with perhaps even more on the way.

So despite your physical age, how old are you, really? Do you think the shorter life span would have made you be average, short-lived, or long-lived?

One element is mental age, but don't neglect real "evidence." If you have a disease or condition, has it become better controlled or even curable? If so, would it have been something more deadly back then?

[dimbear]

1. The distribution of age a millenium ago wasn't so different as all that.

Life expectancy was short because lots of folk died while infants. Once you got to be about 30, you had a good chance of making 70, only slightly less than you would today.

Medicine started to change the curve a little tiny bit around 1900, not before then , and then not by much.

In period books you see references to old folks who are 60 or so, which is a bit hurtful to a codger like me, but the fact is that a person who was 60 wasn't probably a valuable field hand or woodchopper or turnip peeler. Probably more useful as a reclusive noblewoman or quack doctor.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. The shorter life expectancy at birth was mostly due to two things:

infant mortality and disease. The infant mortality rate in 1850 was around 20% (one in five infants didn't see their first birthday). Disease was due to lack of medical and other advances we take for granted; people died of smallpox (which killed one of my great-great-great-grandfathers in 1862), tuberculosis (which killed my great-great uncle in 1938), and syphilis in the days before vaccination and antibiotics, and people died of typhoid in the days before clean running water and gravity-flow indoor plumbing. Advances in medical science have made things like strokes, heart attacks and cancer much more survivable as well, which increases overall life expectancy, but even so it wasn't uncommon for people to live into their 70's or '80's.

[hyphenate]

3. My dad's father

died from TB. It was around 1932 or som since my dad was still a child. He would have been in his early 40s.

The whole family died relatively early--60s f0r most of them or early 70s. Nana was 71; Dad was 58, one aunt was at 62. Can't remember them all now, as it was in the early 80s when most of them went, amazingly, an aunt died in August 1983, her brother (uncle) a month later, in Sept 1983 and then my dad, January, 1984, 5 months later.

[pipi_k]

4. One thing I'm noticing

as I do my family tree is that a lot of ancestors on my mother's side lived to a great age, even 100+ years ago.

On my father's side, not so many. In fact, my 5th or 6th great grandfather and his wife had 12 children, and only 6 survived beyond childhood.

Quite a few of those who lived beyond 65 or 70 actually died of things that are curable today (like pneumonia, etc) and who knows how long they might have lived had the proper medications been available back then...

[Ikonoklast]

5. This guy sends me a birthday card every year now.

"Just wanted to see how you're doing, enjoy your day!"


Never met the guy, seems like a nice enough fellow, I'm sure we'll meet one day.