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What did people get sick 100 years ago?
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Influenza and tuberculosis took more lives in the past than cancer and heart disease do today.
Medical historians David Jones, Scott Podolsky and Jeremy Green analyzed mortality rates around the world over the past hundred years and compared which diseases took the most lives in 1900 and today.
The numbers near the vertical axis are the total number of deaths, and the number near the name of each disease is the number of deaths per 100,000 people. As can be seen from the diagram, the nature of diseases and their prevalence have changed significantly: some diseases have become curable or have disappeared completely, while others have appeared recently.
It is worth noting that at the beginning of the last century, doctors were significantly concerned about the problems of a sedentary lifestyle, which, as expected, would result from the widespread use of cars, elevators and other mechanisms that facilitate the physical activity of people of the future.
One of the articles of that time predicted, in particular, the emergence of such an ailment as “car knee”, implying by this term probable problems with joints from long periods of driving in one position.
The graph also shows that the development of medicine (especially the invention of antibiotics and the widespread use of basic hygiene rules) in the 20th century made it possible to practically eliminate mortality from pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal diseases. At the same time, for a number of reasons, cardiovascular diseases have become the main threat to modern earthlings, as well as cancer.
Among the significant threats that humanity has faced with greater or lesser losses over the past hundred years, scientists note periodic outbreaks of various infectious diseases, such as Eastern equine encephalitis in 1938, the so-called Legionnaires' disease in 1977, AIDS in 1981, and tuberculosis, which unexpectedly mutated and became resistant to vaccines in 1993.