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People 100 years ago died so much younger. 14 major reasons explain everything.

In 1796 we invented this amazing thing that could keep you from getting deadly diseases.

Photo by Social History Archive on Unsplash

Lifespans were far shorter a century ago. Why?

Most of us know that human lifespans, overall, have gotten much longer. In the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy was a mere 31 years — though it's heavily skewed by the large number of people who died during childhood. Even still, a person living into their 80s or 90s was considered relatively rare.

One of the main reasons was that people at the time had little to no protection against disease.

That all started to change around 1796. That's when an English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox, eventually creating an effective vaccine. It didn't become widely used for another several decades after that. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing now standing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids.


vaccines, lifespan, longevity, medicine, science, health, public health, breakthroughs, old age Edward Jenner, certified stud.By John Raphael Smith - [1] [2], originally uploaded to en by User:Magnus Manske, Public Domain

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

Wellness involves a lot of personal choices and the tradeoff between personal liberty and shared public good.

Measles is the starkest example. In 2014, there were over 600 cases of measles in America during the first seven months of the year. According to the CDC, ten years later in 2024 there were 284 cases of measles nationwide. Though the numbers have improved in a decade, 89% of 2024's cases came from people who are unvaccinated or refused to share their vaccine status.

Anti-vaccination movements aren't new. Controversy, fear, and anti-vaccination rhetoric has plagued immunization efforts as far back as the early 1800s. Despite research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) showing that vaccines and immunization research has had a positive impact on global health, the anti-vaccination movements don't seem to be facing eradication any time soon.

vaccines, lifespan, longevity, medicine, science, health, public health, breakthroughs, old age Vaccines changed everything about human longevity. Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash

The chart below was made by graphic designer Leon Farrant and uses data from the CDC and JAMA to show that 14 major vaccines have real public health benefits.

Paired with decades of improved medical care, vaccines have nearly eradicated many formerly fatal illness like Polio, Measles, Malaria, and Diphtheria. The impact of one's personal health choices can have a significant impact on the population around them, in their communities, and even on a national level. It makes that trade-off all the more complicated and one not easily distilled into one convenient political or religious ideology.

image illustrated vaccines facing each other Infographic by designer Leon Farrant based on 2012/13 data. image from Leon Farrant

Obviously, the topic of vaccinations has become immensely more complicated and controversial over the years, especially since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020. But history teaches us valuable lessons and information is power. No matter how you feel about vaccines today, this chart is a reminder that medical science can be used for incredible good. Without breakthrough vaccinations in the past, many of us would likely not be here to have the debate about our personal choices now and in the future.

This article originally appeared eleven years ago. It has been updated.

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Reminder: McConnell overcame polio as a kid with big help from the government.

Long before Mitch McConnell was attempting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, he was fighting for his health as a small child growing up in Alabama — with help from the federal government and private donations.

When he was just 2 years old, McConnell was diagnosed with polio, Death and Taxes reported. As McConnell explained to his Senate colleagues in 2005, his mother had been "perplexed about what to do"; his father was serving overseas in World War II at the time, and — as these were the days before Medicaid or Medicare — health care options were limited. McConnell's mother worried her son might become disabled.

McConnell was fortunate to live a short drive away from Warm Springs, Georgia, where a polio rehab center had been established by President Roosevelt.

It was funded, in large part, through public efforts.

A child in bed recovering from polio in 1950. Photo by Douglas Grundy/Three Lions/Getty Images.

In the mid-1930s, roughly a decade before McConnell started receiving treatments at the center, Roosevelt's March of Dimes fundraising strategy for the center grew into a remarkable success. The president had asked Americans to send dimes to the White House in support of children living with polio, and within just one month, $268,000 (about $4.6 million today) had been raised. Kids like McConnell benefited greatly.

“We had left Warm Springs for the last time, and the physical therapist there had told my mother, 'Your son can walk now,'" an emotional McConnell told the Senate in 2005. "'We think he’s going to have a normal childhood and a normal life.'"

McConnell's health scare from seven decades ago —concerning a disease that's now eradicated in the U.S., no less — is incredibly relevant today.

Children who are in similar circumstances as McConnell once was — kids living with costly, threatening health ailments, whose family situations complicate their access to care — could be harmed greatly should the Republican leader's attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) be successful.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

GOP senators are hovering around the 50-vote threshold to pass an alarmingly heartless bill that would strip Medicaid funding by billions of dollars — a move that'd disproportionately hurt the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. The overhaul would also allow states to drop certain benefits, like maternity care and mental health services, set in place by the Affordable Care Act.

Should the bill become law, wealthy Americans and drug companies — on the receiving end of massive tax breaks — would benefit greatly.

Anxieties over the bill's passage prompted dozens of demonstrators — many of whom were disabled and use wheelchairs — to protest the deep spending cuts outside McConnell's office on June 22.

In total, 43 were arrested. Many were forcibly removed.

"People with disabilities depend on Medicaid for our lives and for our liberty," Stephanie Woodward, one demonstrator who was arrested, explained in an interview.

A video of her chanting, "no cuts to Medicaid," as Capitol police carried her away from the senator's office quickly went viral in the protest's aftermath.

A lot has changed since McConnell's brush with polio in the 1940s, but the importance of valuing basic compassion in our health care system hasn't.

If anyone's experiences underline that, it's Senator McConnell's. Let him and every legislator know how you feel when it comes to access to health care.

Call your senator to tell them you don't support the GOP's efforts to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

Please note: Upworthy has reached out to Sen. McConnell for comment. This article may be updated.

This article was updated 6/26/2017 to clarify the difference between public funding and private donations.

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19 fascinating pictures to remind us what polio used to look like.

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March of Dimes

My dad had weird feet.

He was born in 1942, and when he was just a few years old, he caught polio. He survived the disease, but it affected the way his legs and feet grew — one foot was always a shoe size or two smaller than the other one. I remember being fascinated by them when I was little.

Though polio affected my father, I myself have never been in danger of contracting it.

In fact, the disease has disappeared completely from the United States, and we're incredibly close to eliminating it worldwide.

But as much as we should celebrate its passing, we should also remember what it was like when polio affected people everywhere. And though these photos may be somber, they should also give us hope; they prove that we can overcome the worst obstacles and most pernicious infections. After all, we've done it before.

Check out these photos of what polio looked like when my dad was a kid.

Polio was a scourge. It could affect anyone. But it preyed most heavily on children.

A child paralyzed by polio in 1947. Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images.

A young patient getting fit with a respirator in 1955. Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images.

Polio's actually a lot older than my father was. We even have paintings of it from ancient Egypt.

This over-3,300-year-old Egyptian stele is thought to depict a polio victim. Image via Deutsches Grünes Kreuz/Wikimedia Commons.

For most of that time, polio was content to remain quiet.

But in the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a killer. In 1952, an outbreak killed over 3,000 people and paralyzed over 21,000 in the U.S. alone.

Photo from Douglas Grundy/Three Lions/Getty Images.

Polio is a virus passed mostly through contaminated food and water. And as long as we humans were spread out, it never got the momentum to really become a problem. But as cities grew and, ironically, better sanitation came about and removed some of our natural exposure to it, polio suddenly found a weak spot in our defenses.

Children were most at risk of contracting the virus – hence one of its common names: infantile paralysis.

Photo by Sonnee Gottlieb/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

In most cases, it's either harmless or mild, like a case of the flu. But in some people, polio can cause serious, sometimes permanent paralysis.

A paralyzed kid at London's Queen Mary's Hospital in 1947. Photo by George Konig/Keystone Features/Getty Images.

If the virus ends up in the central nervous system, it interrupts our body's ability to communicate with our muscles, causing paralysis. And if the paralysis lasts for a long time, the muscles themselves can start to waste away, a process known as atrophy.

This is already bad, but there's one more cruel twist to the disease. If a child is the one who gets paralyzed, the muscle atrophy can end up affecting the way their bones grow. That's what happened with my dad and why his feet looked so weird.

If the diaphragm was paralyzed, patients would need respirators to be able to breathe. Some respirators were portable, like this one.

A portable respirator from 1955. Photo by Hans Meyer/BIPs/Getty Images.

For a given value of "portable."

Others, like the iron lung, effectively trapped you inside.

An iron lung in 1938. Photo from London Express/Getty Images.

If you did recover, you may have still needed regular physical therapy to strengthen the atrophied muscles. Aquatic therapy was popular.

Photo by Juliette Lasserre/BIPs/Getty Images.

At its height, polio was one of the great public specters. People were terrified of it. Public pools were closed in a misguided effort to stop the spread. Houses were quarantined.

A board of health warning circa 1910. Image from National Library of Medicine/Wikimedia Commons.

There were public health campaigns and donation drives to help fuel research, like the March of Dimes.

A cartoon from 1943. Image from U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons.

Still, nobody seemed safe. Even President Franklin Roosevelt had it, although he was careful about hiding his paralysis from the outside world.

A rare photograph of FDR in his wheelchair. Image from Margaret Suckley/Wikimedia Commons.

It was one of the great scourges of its time.

Then, in the early 1950s, Jonas Salk invented the first polio vaccine.

Photo by Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Salk was a researcher and virologist who joined the fight against polio in the late 1940s. Initially tasked with identifying different strains of the virus, Salk and his team saw an opportunity to try to prevent the disease altogether, and their work paid off.

Manufacturers began to mass produce it.

Workers at England's Glaxo company in 1956. Photo from Fox Photos/Getty Images.

Suddenly, people could save their children from this awful disease.

Photo by Monty Fresco Jnr/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

As people became immunized against it, the disease had a harder and harder time spreading between populations. Numbers of infections started to fall.

And, slowly, polio transformed from a demonic specter into a manageable disease, then, eventually, into a distant memory.

A woman examines a gigantic model of a single polio virus capsule in 1959. Photo from Fox Photos/Getty Images.

Thanks to the vaccines created by Salk and other researchers, most of the world began to forget this disease.

Today, we're on the cusp of eradicating polio altogether. Its last holdouts are in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.

A child afflicted with polio in Afghanistan in 2009. Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.

We're really close. In fact, one of polio's three strains has already been eliminated.

Photo by A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images.

Which is why the U.N. switched to a two-strain vaccine in May of 2016.

In 2015, there were only 74 recorded cases of polio in the entire world. Just 74!

A Pakistani child receives the oral polio vaccine in 2016. Photo from Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images.

Polio has no natural reservoir. It has no place to hide. Once it's gone, it's gone.

We might never be able to eliminate the flu because it can hide in so many animals, like birds or pigs. But polio only infects humans. So when all humans are immunized, polio will disappear.

We're so close to eliminating a horrible disease thanks to researchers like Salk and workers dedicated to administering vaccinations. There are occasional setbacks, such as a recent shortage of the new vaccine, but researchers hope to completely eliminate the disease by the end of this decade.

We can overcome the worst demons. We have before. And we can do it again.

In the future, the only place where polio will exist is in picture archives like these. And the memories of my dad's poor feet.

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