The Grim Reaper will come for us all but the New England Journal of Medicine has done an interesting article about the differences between how we might die today and how we are more likely to have pushed up the daisies in 1900.

For Americans the average life expectancy in 1900 was 49 years and now it is almost 79 today – plus as you’d expect a much higher quality of life. Quality of life has improved everywhere including the UK where every long term unemployed dosser thinks that SkyTV is his YumanRite’innit?

As Gordon Brown stole our pensions maybe living longer is not so much of a bonus after all but TheEye will swap it for the alternative every time.

On topic, though – TheEye, as regular readers will be aware, was a trainee sawbones at one point, hence the interest.

However from an unsourced scan the ever excellent AceOfSpades makes a comparison to deaths in 1812:

Drinking cold water? (2)


Apoplexy? (13)


Mortification? (11)

Actually TheEye can cite an office meeting yesterday that could have caused my death by all of those individually, let alone combined.

If only it have also been Small-Pox (2) and TheEye could have taken some of them with me.