ABSTRACT
A historian has good reason to be fairly confident when tackling the question of the number of old people in historical times. In Sweden people have unusually good source material, which enables them to determine how many old people there have been since the eighteenth century down to the present. Old age came earlier in the past. The parish registers of deaths often describe people in their fifties as feeble, sickly, crippled, old. This was especially true of the lower classes in society, those who were most severely afflicted by occupational injuries and by working in injurious environments. Death in the past could afflict all age groups in a way different from today, when most people can count on experiencing old age before they die. The number of 90-year-olds will be many times greater in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This peak corresponds to the high birthrate of the 1920s.
