Indeed, it is difficult to imagine, from the security of our twenty-first-century perspective, how familiar death was in the late nineteenth century. Suffering, injury, and disease were altogether routine, part of the ordinary experience of everyday life. People tend to use average life span to illustrate historic differences in health, but those figures—in 1870 the average life span in Europe and the United States was about thirty-six years, compared to about eighty years today—don’t nearly make the point strongly enough.
