ABSTRACT
The watershed of changes in health and disease with capitalism is larger and more fundamental than even those associated with the origins of agriculture and class society itself, seven to ten thousand years ago. Looked at in the broadest possible way, capitalism has had two historically unprecedented major health achievements. First, the world population alive today is much larger than any previous form of society could support. Second, this manifold expansion of population has been achieved by improvement in health and decline in death rates to levels lower than those enjoyed even by the elites of the past. Important contributions to the rise of modern diseases also come from occupational and environmental hazards characteristic of capitalism. The key to understanding modern male excess mortality is to see that females have benefited much more than men from the health advance possible with capitalism, while men have suffered more from the rise of stress-induced and other risk factors.
