Nancy Jardine Author: L is for Life Expectancy…and Living Circumstances!

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

L is for Life Expectancy…and Living Circumstances!

Welcome to Day 12 of my April A to Z Blog challenge.

Life Expectancy? What does that mean?

The meaning from the Oxford dictionary: “The average period that a person may expect to live.

(2023: The British male now has a life expectancy of 77.6 years)

Average life expectancy can fluctuate depending on the inhabited part of the planet, but it can also be very volatile depending on the living circumstances that people endure as they progress through their lives. Life expectancy also changes according to the age a person has reached, having survived that duration without succumbing to the many reasons for death!

Libberton Wynd
(pulled down
before 1850)

Naturally the life expectancy of someone who laboured, as opposed to the life of the idle rich, affected their average life expectancy. In many respects, that applies now just as much as it did in Victorian Scotland in 1851.

Hardship can reduce the average life span dramatically, even without the associated diseases that often go hand in hand with poverty and toil. In 1851, the year that the main character in my current writing moves to Edinburgh to take up employment as a tutor, the average lifespan in Scotland was about 40 for men and about 42 for women. Compare that with the present-day figures at 77.6 years for men, and more like 80+ for women, this being because infant mortality is relatively low compared to 1850.

Average life expectancy tables can definitely be skewed by the rate of infant mortality. The figure of 40 for a man, and 42 for a woman in 1850 was highly influenced by the fact that in 1850 infant mortality was such that 25% of infants died before the age of five. For every year that an infant survives, their life expectancy increases.

Some Victorian people certainly lived much longer than that average of 40 or 42 since 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80 years of age.

Cowgate

However, from birth there were many hurdles for a person to jump to live to an old age. Infants died for many reasons, and not all those who came from poor households. Infant diseases affected the houses of all. Premature birth; low birth weight; what we now term sudden infant death syndrome; suffocation from sharing beds with older siblings, or parents, all played a part in infant death. Diseases were huge contributors - infants contracted lung infections leading to acute respiratory disease; acute digestive disease from contaminated non-breast and tainted breast milk; and contaminated early solid food. Convulsions were also common leading to early death.

If infants grew to become older children, they often had to battle with other diseases like cholera; scarlet fever; measles - these diseases affecting poor as well as rich children. Damp housing exacerbated diarrhoea and tuberculosis, though these could also affect rich children, too. Rickets (lack of Vitamin D) were a scourge, mainly affecting the poor, and it was prevalent in the UK till around 1950 when children were given cod liver oil from the government (fledgling NHS) as a source of vitamin D. Rickets didn’t always kill, but like the disease polio, it maimed to the extent that disability often led to other reasons for an early death as in falling under the wheels of a coach, or an inability to move away swiftly form dangerous situations in factories or workplaces.

Older children and adults had to survive accidents at work in the mines and the factories, some of the injuries from accidents so severe that amputation was common. If the person survived the medical intervention of the amputation, and survived the likely blood infections that were often a result, then they had to afterwards find employment that suited their disability. If that wasn’t possible, they had to live off the charity of family or friends, or go the dreaded workhouse!

The living conditions for many Scottish city dwellers were dire. Unsanitary housing went hand-in-hand with overcrowding, leading to other less debilitating but persistent diseases and infections like lice and scabies. It's no excuse, but it’s easy to see that many poor people turned to alcohol, gin in particular, to make their lives more bearable. Unfortunately, an excess consumption of alcohol also contributed to a shorter life expectancy in 1851.