A thousand years ago, European life expectancy at birth was just in the twenties, since so many people died in infancy or youth from diseases like cholera and dysentery, which are now easily preventable.[103] By the middle of the nineteenth century, life expectancy in the United Kingdom and the United States had increased to the forties.[104] As of 2023 it has risen to over eighty in much of the developed world.[105] So we have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years, and doubled it in the past two centuries.
