An entertaining, eye-opening work of popular history that illuminates how death has changed over time.
Dementia, heart failure, and cancer are now the leading causes of death in industrialized nations, where life expectancy is mostly above 80. A century ago, life expectancy was about 50, and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth, and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents.
Causes of death have changed irrevocably over time. Over a few centuries, we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age and famine could be just one bad harvest away to one where excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why is this? Why don’t we no longer die from the plague, scurvy, or smallpox? And why are heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and cancer so prevalent today?
This Mortal Coil explains why we died in the past, the reasons we die now, and how the causes of death are about to change profoundly. The University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening, global portrait of death throughout time, looking at particular causes of death – from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet – who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them.
