Historian Dan Carlin wrote in his book The End Is Always Near: Pretty much nothing separates us from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. . . . If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre-industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock. Modern life in general is about as safe as it’s ever been. And effectively all the improvement over the last century has come from a decline in infectious disease.
