Comment: The mortality rate for men in early middle age shot up to a level in 1918 that had been exceeded only once in the preceding seven decades—in 1849, the
year of a great cholera epidemic. The excess deaths in 1918 were due principally to war, but substantially also to influenza.
Method: Mortality rates were downloaded from the Human Mortality Database (see www.mortality.org or
www.humanmortality.de)
on 4 December 2009. The plotted lines connect unsmoothed values.
Comment: The mortality rate for men in early middle age shot up to a level in 1918 that had been exceeded only once in the preceding seven decades—in 1849, the year of a great cholera epidemic. The excess deaths in 1918 were due principally to war, but substantially also to influenza.
Method: Mortality rates were downloaded from the Human Mortality Database (see www.mortality.org or www.humanmortality.de) on 4 December 2009. The plotted lines connect unsmoothed values.