Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Kings, queens and dukes were always richer and more powerful than the population at large, and would surely have liked to use their money and power to lengthen their lives, but before 1750 they had no effective way of doing so. Why did that change? While we have no way of being sure, the best guess is that, perhaps starting as early as the 16th century, but accumulating over time, there was a series of practical improvements and innovations in health. (…)
The children of the royal family were the first to be inoculated against smallpox (after a pilot experiment on condemned prisoners), and Johansson notes that “medical expertise was highly priced, and many of the procedures prescribed were unaffordable even to the town-dwelling middle-income families in environments that exposed them to endemic and epidemic disease.” So the new knowledge and practices were adopted first by the better-off—just as today where it was the better-off and better-educated who first gave up smoking and adopted breast cancer screening. Later, these first innovations became cheaper, and together with other gifts of the Enlightenment, the beginnings of city planning and improvement, the beginnings of public health campaigns (e.g. against gin), and the first public hospitals and dispensaries, they contributed to the more general increase in life chances that began to be visible from the middle of the 19th century.
Why is this important? The absence of a gradient before 1750 shows that there is no general health benefit from status in and of itself, and that power and money are useless against the force of mortality without weapons to fight. (…)
Men die at higher rates than women at all ages after conception. Although women around the world report higher morbidity than men, their mortality rates are usually around half of those of men. The evidence, at least from the US, suggests that women experience similar suffering from similar conditions, but have higher prevalence of conditions with higher morbidity, and lower prevalence of conditions with higher mortality so that, put crudely, women get sick and men get dead.
{ Angus Deaton, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Princeton University | Continue reading | PDF }
artwork { Willem de Kooning, Queen of Hearts, 1943-46 }
