Mortality Rates
One of the hard things about imagining oneself in the middle ages, or writing a character who lives then, is figuring out the odds of them living at all. The median lifespan of an individual living in the US was 78.7 years in 2010, unchanged since 2004. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm I’ve posted before about life expectancy in the Middle ages (https://sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/ and https://sarahwoodbury.com/child-mortality/), indicating that among the elite, both men and women–if they survived childhood–couldn’t reasonably expect to live out of their forties. Some people did, but what were the mechanisms that kept mortality high? “Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate Read more…
Medieval Life Expectancy: Muslim World verses Christian World
What was the life expectancy of those in the medieval Muslim world compared to Christian Europe? It is taken as given in this day and age that people living in Europe in the Middle Ages didn’t bathe much, if at all, had no real knowledge of science or medicine, and their high mortality rates were a consequence of this general ignorance. Neither of the these assertions are, in fact, true, but the average human life span in the Middle Ages was significantly lower than the modern one nonetheless. I have discussed this in several places on this blog. Here: https://sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/ I discuss the life span of the royal house of Wales and the Marche. Eliminating individuals who died before adulthood completely from the equation, the mean life expectancy for women was 43.6 years, with a median of 42/43; for men, it was a mean Read more…
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