Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!decuac!jcp
From: jcp@decuac.DEC.COM (Jolly C. Pancakes)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Future Work
Message-ID: <2998@decuac.DEC.COM>
Date: 12 Apr 90 18:47:38 GMT
References: <9004121351.AA08723@lti2.lti.uucp>
Organization: Fluffy Otter Kindercare
Lines: 24

In article <9004121351.AA08723@lti2.lti.uucp>, reg@lti2.UUCP (Rick Genter x18) writes:
> The average life expectency during the time of the Roman Emperors was ~40 yrs.
> Today it's ~75 yrs.  Yet our lifestyle is distinctly unhealthy.  Go figure.

	Remember that "average life expectancy" is just that, an
average.  The "average" reader often sees that figure and gets a mental
picture of a society in which a bunch of greybearded 35-year olds are
tottering around and falling over dead.  Rather, it's the average of the
large number of babies who died of diarrhea before age two, the children who 
died of disease before age 10, the agricultural workers who died of
accidents before age 30 and the girls and women who died in childbirth
before age 25.  There were people who lived well into their sixties and
seventies, including several Roman senators, and generally people who
lived that long were healthy to start with. THe big advances that we
have made as a society in prolonging the average life expectancy have
been in public health - that is, sanitation and vaccinations.
Ironically, for a long time "advances" in medicine caused death rates
for women in childbirth to go *up* as doctors with bizarre notions of
treatment took over for midwives.

-- 
jcpatilla						jcp@decuac.dec.com

"Fling your beavers aloft!"