Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

The new provincial towns and cities really dragged down the national life-expectancy figures. They were not only considerably lower than the figure for England and Wales, they also fell markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.[18] The numbers are skewed by very high infant mortality rates, with one in five babies dying before their first birthday.[19] In the central areas of Manchester and Liverpool, you could expect to live for around twenty-five years—a shorter lifespan than at any time since the Black Death.[20] The figures are even worse when we focus just on the poor. Life expectancy for factory laborers was seventeen in Manchester and fifteen in Liverpool.[21] Death rates were so high among the urban working classes that the population was only able to sustain itself because of the continual inflow of people from the surrounding countryside, and increasingly from Ireland. As northern towns and cities were the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, this is clear evidence that economic growth and increasing real wages did not automatically lead to improvements in health via the invisible hand of the market.