While books like this always trumpet the fact that lifespans have nearly doubled since the late 1800s, the lion’s share of that progress may have resulted entirely from antibiotics and improved sanitation, as Steven Johnson points out in his book Extra Life. The Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon analyzed mortality data going back to 1900 (see figure 1) and found that if you subtract out deaths from the eight top infectious diseases, which were largely brought under control by the advent of antibiotics in the 1930s, overall mortality rates declined relatively little over the
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