[Theophilus]

Walk through a old cemetery. All of the babies that died 100 years ago show that the preponderance of the improvement in life expectancy has not been caused my space-age technology but by the discovery of antibiotics. Whatever extensions that artificial joints, organ transplants and chemotherapy are providing are more than compensated for by our horrible modern lifestyles.

Psalm 90:10
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

[caddie]

LOTS of other things besides earaches and sore throats bumped off kids.

All the surgical advances kept a kid with pyloric stenosis alive. All the cardiac surgery advances kept a kid with Tetralogy alive. All the neonatology, critical care, neurosurgery, nutrition, etc., kept premature kids alive.

No way was it just sulfa drugs and penicillin.

In fact, the first antibiotics, penicillin and sulfa drugs, were not available until WW2... the elongation in life expectancy started well before 1939.

It was a worldwide army of people working their behinds off, caring for the sick, and doing research on millions of different things.

Not just antibiotics.