Old Age is Not for the Faint of Heart

Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century that “there are six stages in a lifetime: infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, and old age.” He defined old age as beginning at 70.

In the thirteenth century, Phillipe de Novare wrote The Four Ages of Men, in which he chose old age as sixty. He subdivided old age into two stages, senectus (Latin for old), elderly but still active, and senium (senile), refers to the final stage of the human lifespan, specifically associated with the physical and mental declines of old age .

In our society, old people are spoken of as seniors. Seniors can be someone fifty-five plus, 60, or 65, depending on who makes the decision to put people into categories. And then, there is the unkind definition of old people as “units,’ enshrined into the Affordable Care Act.

If you are sixty-five or older, you are in the eighteen percent population group in America today. People live longer due to better medical care, better food, better housing, vitamins, medicines, vaccines, better education, more schooling, and overall information which humans across the centuries have lacked. Some live longer thanks to genetics and having children with a person who also has a healthier genetic code. Other groups interbreed which causes their heirs to have severe health issues which shortens their lifespan with or without proper medical care.

Most people believe that life expectancy before modern medicine was quite low for everybody, yet there are records of many people who lived to a ripe old age.

It is true that a lot of women died giving birth and many children did not live past a certain age due to unsanitary conditions, lack of proper nutrition, healthy food, water, and good shelters. Thirty to fifty percent of all births ended in the death of the newborn. Mothers and their newborn often died during birth or shortly after. If babies survived infancy and turned seven, their odds of survival increased considerably.

Men tended to go to wars either to make a living for their families or because they were indentured by their lords. Elite men tended to die in battle or from battle related injuries. Life expectancy was hard to calculate, and it depended on variables such as the person’s age, gender, and socio-economic status.

The richer the person, the longer their lifespans. They had better living conditions, better housing, better food, and a varied diet. However, if they married within the family, their children had serious health problems.

Looking at tax records, Lucie Laumonier, discovered that 885 inhabitants of medieval Florence were ninety and older. She wrote that in 1425 Florence, 20 percent of the population was sixty or older and, “in the Tuscan countryside, the percentage of elderly people would have been even higher, around 24 percent of the population.”

Elderly people were asked at times to remember how certain things were organized in the past in the area in which they lived. In 1330s a 70-year-old woman was asked to remember how the Montpelier herb market was organized in her youth.

To calculate life expectancy before our modern time, historians used archeological evidence, documents, and demographics. Wills, tax rolls, parish registers of births and deaths, and the age of those described in documents. Accounting of castles and manors described the population and the needs within.

Skeletal remains were evaluated for tooth layers and cement layers, like tree rings. Spinal changes, hips, and joints were also analyzed for age determination at the time of death. Because they were not complete, census records gave an approximation of population and age distribution. The data was never accurate because nobility tended to have more documentation of death, wills, and general demographics than the rest of the population.

It suffices to say that life expectancy determination is a modern construct.