ABSTRACT
Health lies at the heart of human development. Our most basic personal and collective decisions reflect our wish to live long, comfortable, and active lives. Yet, for most of human history, the average person’s life has been difficult, constrained, and short. When John Graunt first constructed the Bills of Mortality for the city of London in 1650, he found that life expectancy was about 27 years (Graunt 1662).1 In general, up to the time of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, human life displayed a Malthusian pattern of high mortality with transitory deviations, upwards in times of plenty and downwards in times of want or plague.2
