The development of large-scale industry has made possible the technical reconstruction of the lives of people, building a well-appointed dwellings, the development of sanitary and improvement of residential areas. At the beginning of the XIX century. became the first activities carried out by urban renewal, the creation of the centralized water supply, sewerage, cleaning. Subsequently, they have borne fruit in the form of a sharp reduction in deaths from diseases such as typhus, plague, cholera, dysentery and other stomach ailments. Of great importance were new methods of water purification, sterilization of food, heating and lighting of homes and business premises, a gradual change in working conditions, the development of safety regulations, etc. The development of technology has changed the requirements to be met by the production skills, culture and level of employee health. This gave rise to some improvement in the living conditions and the growth of its duration.
Reducing mortality is closely linked not only with material production, but also to the production of the people themselves. So that at low average life expectancy was maintained constant population size, it is necessary that every woman gave birth to an average of 4.5 children, as the high mortality rate leads to the fact that by the end of the childbearing period the mother will have an average of two living children. With an average life expectancy 68 years the same result as in the sense of keeping unchanged in population, and in terms of the number of living children for 55-59 years, achieved at the cost of approximately 2.2 birth per woman. The bourgeois state, as a rule, was interested in maintaining a stable population, or even slow its growth. And the situation is "low mortality rate - low birth rate" was for him a more "profitable" than the old one - a "high mortality rate - a high birth rate."
In reducing mortality also played the role of awareness of self-worth of human life, which emerged in the era of the Renaissance and grew stronger with the progress of science and the restructuring of public consciousness. By the XIX century, the problem of death was conceptualized and experience (at least in Western Europe) as a problem of his own death, "his" death. In place of the deadpan "all die" came the tragic awareness of the inevitable destruction of his own personality, unique and unrepeatable. This new vision of death had a profound effect on the attitude of the people all of the time, but it is particularly important that the new attitude toward death could not but arouse the activity of man, of his desire to resist death, and if not eliminate it completely, then push as far as possible.
In the XIX century, accelerated began back in XVII-XVIII centuries. changes in hygiene. During the XVII-XVIII centuries. customs do not eat with your hands, wash every day, change clothes, etc. gradually spread among the richest part of the population of European countries, but only in the XIX century, they have become firmly embedded in the everyday life of the people. This was, on the one hand, to overcome the isolation of rural life and increase the adoption of cultural skills, on the other - serial production more efficient and hygienic clothing, cheap consumer goods (clothes, dishes), available hygiene products (soap, and others), medicines and etc.
A huge role in the fight against exogenous mortality played the progress of medicine, which is largely based on the development and achievements of chemistry and biology. Back in the late XVIII century. E. Jenner discovered a method to build a strong immunity against one of the most dreaded diseases - smallpox, which not only made possible the complete elimination of the disease, but for the first time showed a great efficacy of the principle, which was destined to become one of the cornerstones of preventive medicine - the principle of individual protection of the human body .
The application of this principle in the fight against smallpox remained except in medical practice until the last third of the XIX century., When, due primarily to the work of L. Pasteur, was established germ theory of disease and the principal way of dealing with them. This path led not only to secure the prevention of infectious diseases through vaccination, but, as shown by the development of microbiology in the XX century, and an extremely effective treatment for many of them, including such dangerous as syphilis, tuberculosis and polio. An important place is the development of modern methods of antiseptics, X-ray and a number of other achievements of medical science. On some advances in medicine can be seen by tracing the dynamics of a number of causes of death in the middle of the XIX century in England and Wales (Table 7).
Table 7
The number of dying from all causes per 1,000 live births (England and Wales, men)
Causes of death 1861 1901 1940. 1964.
Infectious and parasitic diseases 229.7 165.3 69.3 9.8
Including pulmonary tuberculosis 109.5 77.4 40.2 5.9
Neoplasms 14.0 52.3 118.8 201.1
Cardiovascular disease 124.3 181.5 348.7 497.4
Influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis 132.2 165.2 163.2 132.5
Accidents, poisoning and violent deaths 49.4 48.9 86.0 45.8
Other and unspecified causes 450.4 386.8 214.0 113.4
Source: Anatoly Vishnevsky Reproduction of the population and society. Moscow, 1982. S. 110.
Thus, we can assume that in 1861 the majority of births were to die mainly from exogenous factors. First of all, from such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, infectious and parasitic diseases, etc. Only 12-13 people out of every 100 births were dying from the main endogenous causes - heart disease. Over the next hundred years there has been a huge shift in the structure of causes of death, and in the early 60-ies of XX century, cardiovascular disease kills about half of the already born, that is, with a huge reduction in the risk of dying from the most dangerous in the past exogenous causes dramatically increased the probability of die from endogenous causes, particularly from cardiovascular disease.
Centennial period in which there have been changed so much, was very short compared to the many thousands of years, during which the structure of causes of death did not change. For a hundred years, truly accomplished a rapid leap, which was of great importance for the further development. For this jump is moving the vast number of deaths in the older age groups, a huge reduction in mortality at younger ages and the dramatic increase in life expectancy.
3. The evolution of life
When talking about the past, especially on the more remote epochs, the main difficulties in determining the life span associated with a lack of information. Indeed, mortality statistics, such as the one that exists today has only recently. Today, in developed countries, every death is registered. This takes into account, and year of birth, and time of death. On the basis of these data on a regular basis are calculated on the number of dead generations, calendar year, age, and many other features.
In a number of countries already in the X-XI centuries. The beginning of regular entry in the church books of births and deaths. However, such records were not all over the place and there is not always indicate the age or year of birth of the deceased. But since most people are born and die in the same place, the special methods can find information about this dead in the records of births and know his age. The search is very time-consuming, so the calculations were performed only for a small number of individual villages or parishes. To estimate the life expectancy used as heraldic book - stories of noble families and the inscriptions on the monuments on ancient cemeteries. But the farther back in time, the less data, and finally, the written sources are drying up.
First, the earliest data on life expectancy obtained efforts of archaeologists and anthropologists. Found during archaeological excavations of skeletons allow anthropologists to accurately judge the age at which death occurred. Summarizing the data, demographers expect life in past times. A particular difficulty is the fact that the skeletons of children and young people remain very poor, while there is every reason to believe that the children in the old days were dying very often. If you collect scattered information together, and this was done by many demographers, we can give the following picture.
At the end of the Neolithic (New Stone Age), ie about VIII-111 of the second millennium BC, the average life expectancy was just over 20 years, according to other estimates - 20-25 years.
Almost as much or a little longer - up to 30 years - people lived in the Bronze Age and Iron (end of IV - beginning of I millennium BC).
In the ancient period after the occurrence of writing there are new opportunities to study mortality. One of the first to turn to the ancient written sources, was an English mathematician Karl Pearson. According to his calculations, the average life expectancy in ancient Egypt was only 22.5 years. Follower Pearson WR Englishman McDonnell to determine the average life expectancy in ancient Rome and its provinces have chosen a different data source. He studied a collection of gravestone inscriptions dating back to the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus (63 BC - AD '14), which was kept in the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It turned out that the average life expectancy was 22 in Rome, and in the provinces - 25 years.