Meanwhile, the average lifespan in the UK has shot from 46 years in 1900, when the primary heating and power source was coal, to 81 years now. It's easy to forget how much worse things were before.

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autoexec 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder what Sweden was doing differently

> Take for example this distribution of age at death in Sweden in 1900. You will see, that in 1900, life expectancy was 52 years. However, the median age at death (the age above and below 50% of the population die respectively) is 63 years. Although the life expectancy is only 52 years, an individual has thus a chance of 50% to live past 63 years. Thus, if you went across a Swedish graveyard from 1900 (I'm not sure if the data relates to people born in 1900, or mortality data from 1900, but this is not the point of my comment), you would see that more than half reached an age past 60 years. (https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/zzy2bh/no_avera...)

	▲	actionfromafar 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		UK industrialisation started earlier, is my guess. Crowding and horrible working and living conditions. Swedish cities were horrible too but smaller.

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nine_k 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is right. The discovery of antibiotics and many other medical advances somehow influenced this, too, though.

	▲	dredmorbius 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		General social welfare (housing, food, public health), basic sanitation, food and water quality regulation, and a few very early vaccines had far more to do with this. Antibiotics weren't widespread until after WWII, as were most of the vaccines we currently consider standard. Medicine as a whole is an astounding example of diminishing returns to innovation.