In the previous article I showed that senior officers in the First World War, the ‘Generals’ lived approximately 4 years longer on average than a male in the general population who was born in the same era. I came across two other organisations of professionals of a similar part of the social structure as the army.
The online indexes for Munk’s Roll gives the names, dates of birth and death of Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP)—the Physicians. I again extracted the age at death for those born between 1959 and 1875. As with the Generals, I calculated the age at death by subtracting the year of birth from the year of death. I found 266 records that fitted the criteria.
Similar records for Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS)—the Scientists—were also searched and provided 329 individuals (for comparison with the other groups Foreign Fellows were excluded).
For the Physicians (mean 75; median 76) and Scientists (mean 75; median 75) and Generals (mean 75; median 76), the mean and median age at death was virtually identical. All were statistically highly significantly (P<0.001) greater than the age at death of the whole male population born over the same period.
The survival curves are shown below:
In the case of the Royal Society, earlier research on the longevity of its Fellows has been done and compared with foreign academies which have shown no difference from the general population. That will be the subject of my next and final article in the series, when I also look into the question of what happened next.
The biological questions raised by the differences in longevity seen in different social classes are well known and I will not deal with them here. What does seem clear is that the longevity was similar in the senior members of three professions with different lifestyles in Victorian and Edwardian Britain but longer than that of the male population as a whole.
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