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Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

He lived in India. In the early 1900s. The average lifespan in India in 1920 when he died was 21 to 25 years old. He was 32 when he died, so better than the average. The math checks out.

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Very low historical life expectancies are driven by childhood illness and maternal mortality. If you made it to 15 your life expectancy might be somewhere in your late 50s.

There isn’t data for life expectancy at 15 before 1950 for India here (when it was 60) but you can see the it for Sweden back to 1751.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15...

Well, these numbers are averages between people living until old age (65+ years) and high infant mortality. I don't think most people keeled over when they reach 25 years...

But it does also show lack of accessible medical care in early years, that could have influenced his health overall.

Not so much medical care but proper nutrition and general hygiene.

This is a good example why "mean" and "median" have very different meanings. You can't use an average of life expectancy in an era where a huge percentage of people died before age 5. It's not a useful statistic to the make the point you suggest, and in fact is misleading.

The average life expectancy in the 1920s, even in India, was most definitely not 21-25 years. Various sources show the expectancy age as 51-57. This is because there wasn't enough data for this.

Once in a while I see a stat for "life expectancy at age 5". It should be some kind of normative usage.

He got ill and died after he'd come to England though.

He died in India.

right now its about in the 70s (source I read this somewhere i while ago but dont take my word for it)

> The math checks out.

Show you workings then

He had already moved to UK when he died and died from a lung problem if I recall it correctly.

He moved back to India as his health was miserable in the UK. He died in India.

I didn't know. Thanks.

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