During a recent conversation with my Dad, we were talking about the hereditary proclivity toward long lives in our family tree. Dad is 77, and would be among the youngest in our family tree to die if he passed away tomorrow. Most lived into their eighties and many of my ancestors lived into their nineties. My great-great-grandmother was 96 years old when I was born and passed away the following year.
However, as I thought more about my immediate family, it occurred to me that we all owe our lives directly to modern medicine in one way or another. Dad has had three heart attacks, and likely would not have survived them if not for modern procedures to open blocked arteries. I had an appendectomy in 1988; the first such successful procedure was performed in 1885. My brother has type I diabetes, diagnosed at age 14. The only effective treatment -insulin injection- was introduced in 1922. Prior to that, both diabetes and appendicitis sufferers died after an agonizing (and relatively short, in the case of a burst appendix) period of illness.
My sister is a cancer survivor, having been successfully treated seventeen years ago. Those treatments have kept her free of cancer since. Her husband Dan recently passed away following a tenacious battle against Lou Gehrig’s Disease, for which there is still neither a cure nor effective treatment. And as everyone reading this blog knows, Darcy is currently being treated for leukemia, which according to the doctors would have taken her life within weeks of diagnosis without the chemotherapy that drove it into remission.
Connor was born six weeks premature, and spent a couple weeks in the neo-natal ICU before we were allowed to bring him home. He might have survived a similar beginning a hundred years ago (my grandfather was born in 1911 weighing less than three pounds), but chances are against it.
Being a student of history I am given to feelings of “Wow wouldn’t it be cool to have been there for the signing of the Magna Carta” or any other significant event from throughout history. Who wouldn’t be thrilled to witness the American or French Revolutions, or the Battle of Hastings? However, it seems that had any of my immediate family been born even a hundred years earlier, it is unlikely that we would be alive at our present age, given the history of medical advancement, and its prior limitations. Which raises an important (and somewhat vexing) question: How did so many of my ancestors live to such a ripe old age?
I’m sure the answer is a combination of many, many factors. Though my paternal grandparents were both fairly heavy, most of the pictures of previous generations show them to have been fairly trim. Being farmers, they all did a great deal of hard work- this being the era before big tractors, or tractors at all for that matter- and they didn’t have a McDonald’s down the road to tempt them. I do know that their diet was anything but low-fat; lots of butter, beef fat and bacon to flavor the many vegetables and other staples they ate, and meat was the centerpiece of every meal. I think, however, that Michael Pollan’s new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual provides some important clues. For those who haven’t read any of his books or seen him on television, he advocates a sort of back to basics approach, especially avoiding highly processed foods that are so pervasive in so many of the foods we eat.
Other factors that might contribute include the sedentary lives most of us lead as compared to our ancestors, the plethora of chemicals that bombard us from all directions, and and perhaps the stress of modern living (though I’m not necessarily inclined to believe our lives are that much more stressful than those of our ancestors; we may be less equipped to deal with the stress due to the factors mentioned above.).
In any event, I find it interesting that a majority of the increases we have made in life expectancy over the last few centuries come down to two factors: gains in infant mortality, and (especially) drastic reductions in the number of women who die during childbirth. Modern medicine has made many advances in the treatment of many serious diseases, and Darcy has been the beneficiary of those improvements in technology. The price of such technology is very high, as we have also learned. However, I wonder if the gains made by modern medicine aren’t mostly offset by the hazards of life in today’s environment. As Paul Harvey used to say, maybe we’ve outsmarted ourselves after all…
