How modern medicine made child death rare, and anxiety common

The most striking thing about modern society is not how old we are but how few children there are.

- Dr Ali A Smith

The risk of death in childhood was once very high. In the past, if you reached adulthood you would typically live till relatively old, but childhood was risky. As a consequence, families had large numbers of children ensuring that at least some would survive to adulthood.

We now expect all children to survive and that's not far off being true. The change has taken more than a century. In 1900, 15% of children died and now it’s much less than 1%. In the 18th Century death rates were more like 30%.

The reason for more children surviving includes nutrition, housing and vaccination. They also include the fact that we now screen children for illness before and just after they are born. Illness screening in children is a remarkable set of tests and they are almost forgotten. They achieve both prevention and cure. But they do it without the fanfare of cancer screening.