Medicine: Full of Years

The average length of life of the U.S. people now exceeds 65 years. So declared the ruminant statisticians of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. last week after cud-chewing their latest (1944) figures. Corollaries:

¶ The average 20-year-old now has “as many years of life remaining as the newborn child had in 1900.”

¶ “For white females . . . the average length of life [is] 68.95 years, almost exactly one year short of the biblical three score and ten which . . . was not intended to represent an average, but rather the extreme of life.”