Then the girls started to get sick. On January 18, 1902, the eldest died. Minnie Morden was ten years old. Her seven-year-old sister, Ellamanda, died the same day.
On Sunday, January 19, 1902, the fever took little Dorcas, barely eighteen months old. For the final time, James Morden bundled a child in a blanket, walked through the snow, and laid her down in the cold and dark of the barn, where she and her brothers and sisters would wait through the long winter to be buried.
The same fever that swept away the Morden children in the winter of 1902 leapt from homestead to homestead—the obelisk next to the Mordens’ is dedicated to the two children of Elias and Laura Ashton, lost within weeks of their neighbors. The Ashtons already knew what it felt like to lose children. Their fifteen-year-old son had died in 1900, and a five-year-old boy had been taken from them eight years before that.
It’s hard to find a family that did not suffer losses like these in generations past. Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister in late seventeenth century New England, named one of his daughters Abigail. She died. So he gave the same name to the next daughter to be born. She too died. So he named a third daughter Abigail. She survived to adulthood but died giving birth. In all, Cotton Mather—a well-to-do man in a prosperous society—lost thirteen children to worms, diarrhea, measles, smallpox, accidents, and other causes. “A dead child is a sign no more surprising than a broken pitcher or blasted flower,” he said in a sermon, and yet, familiar as it was, death never lost its power to make the living suffer. “The dying of a child is like the tearing of a limb from us,” wrote Increase Mather, Cotton’s father.
Children were especially vulnerable, but not uniquely so. The plague that swept through the homes of the Mordens and Ashtons and so many others is typical in this regard. It was diphtheria, a disease that is particularly deadly to children but can also kill adults. In 1878, the four-year-old granddaughter of Queen Victoria contracted diphtheria and passed it on to her mother, the queen’s daughter. Queen Victoria was wealthy and powerful beyond compare and yet she could do nothing. Both daughter and granddaughter died.
That world is not ours. We still know tragedy and sorrow, of course, but in neither the quantity nor the quality of those who came before us. A century ago, most people would have recognized the disease afflicting Charles Morden (the enlarged neck was particularly notorious). Today, we may have heard the word “diphtheria” once or twice—it comes up when we take our babies into the doctor’s office to get their shots—but few of us know anything about it. Why would we? A vaccine created in 1923 all but eradicated the disease across the developed world and drastically reduced its toll elsewhere.
The triumph over diphtheria is only one of a long line of victories that created the world we live in. Some are dramatic—the extinction of smallpox is a greater monument to civilization than the construction of the pyramids. Others are considerably less exciting—fortifying foods with vitamins may lack glamour, but it eliminated diseases, made children stronger, and contributed greatly to increased life spans. And some are downright distasteful to talk about—we wrinkle our noses at the mere mention of human waste, but the development of sewage disposal systems may have saved more lives than any other invention in history.
In 1725, the average baby born in what was to become the United States had a life expectancy of fifty years. The American colonies were blessed with land and resources, and American longevity was actually quite high relative to England—where it was a miserable thirty-two years—and most other places and times. And it was creeping up. By 1800, it had reached fifty-six years. But then it slipped back, thanks in part to the growth in urban slums. By 1850, it was a mere forty-three years. Once again, however, it started inching up. In 1900, it stood at forty-eight years.
This is the story of life expectancy throughout human history: A little growth is followed by a little decline and the centuries roll on without much progress.
But then everything changed. By 1950, American life expectancy had soared to sixty-eight. And by the end of the twentieth century, it stood at seventy-eight years. The news was as good or better in other developed countries, where life expectancy approached or exceeded eighty years at the turn of the century. In the second half of the century, similarly dramatic gains were made throughout most of the developing world.
The biggest factor in this spectacular change was the decline in deaths among children. In 1900, almost 20 percent of all children born in the United States—one in five—died before they were five years old; by 1960, that had fallen to 3 percent; by 2002, it was 0.8 percent. There have been huge improvements in the developing world, too. Fifty years ago in Latin America, more than 15 percent of all children died before their fifth birthday; today, that figure is roughly 2 percent. Between 1990 and 2006 alone, the child mortality rate fell 47 percent in China and 34 percent in India.
It is in our nature to become habituated to changes in our environment, and so we think it is perfectly commonplace for the average person to be hale and hearty for more than seven or eight decades and that a baby born today will live an even healthier and longer life. But if we raise our eyes from this moment and look to the history of our species, it is clear this is not commonplace. It is a miracle.
And the miracle continues to unfold. “There are some people, including me, who believe that the increase in life expectancy in the coming century will be about as large as it was in the past century,” says Robert Fogel, the economic historian and Nobel laureate who has spent decades studying health, mortality, and longevity. If Fogel is right, the change will be even more dramatic than it sounds. That’s because massive reductions in child mortality—the largest source of twentieth-century gains—are no longer possible simply because child mortality has already been driven so low. So for equivalent improvements in life span to be made in the twenty-first century, there will have be huge declines in adult mortality. And Fogel feels there will be. “I believe that [of] college-age students [around] today, half of them will live to be one hundred.”
Other researchers are not so bullish, but there is a consensus that the progress of the twentieth century will continue in the twenty-first. A 2006 World Health Organization study of global health trends to 2030 concluded that in each of three different scenarios—baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic—child mortality will fall and life expectancy will rise in every region of the world.
There are clouds on humanity’s horizons, of course. If, for example, obesity turns out to be as damaging as many researchers believe it to be, and if obesity rates keep rising in rich countries, it could undermine a great deal of progress. But potential problems like this have to be kept in perspective. “You can only start worrying about overeating when you stop worrying about undereating, and for most of our history we worried about undereating, ” Fogel wryly observes. Whatever challenges we face, it remains indisputably true that those living in the developed world are the safest, healthiest, and richest humans who ever lived. We are still mortal and there are many things that can kill us. Sometimes we should worry. Sometimes we should even be afraid. But we should always remember how very lucky we are to be alive now.
In an interview for a PBS documentary, Linda Birnbaum, a leading research scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, struck exactly the right balance between taking potential threats seriously and keeping those threats in perspective. “I think as parents, we all worry about our children,” said Birnbaum, who, at the time, led a team investigating the hypothesis that endocrine disruptor chemicals in the environment were taking a hidden toll on human health. “But I think that we have to look at the world our children are living in and realize that they have tremendous access to food, to education, to all the necessities of life plus much more. That their life span is likely to be greater than ours is, which is certainly greater than our parents’ was and much greater than our grandparents or great-grandparents.”