If you were born in 1800, one of nearly a billion people on earth, you couldn’t expect to lives past 30.
If you were born in 2000, one of more than 6 billion people alive, you could hope for 67 years.
The global average for men and women is expected to rise from 67 years at the end of the 20th century to 76 years in the middle of the 21st.
Salisbury native Dr. James Clifford Riley can explain all that and more. Much more.
After 27 years in the history department of Indiana University at Bloomington, Ind., Riley has become world-renowned, not only for his scholarship in the history of public finance, medicine and health but also for establishing a whole new wrinkle in the study of life expectancy.
That’s the subject of his just published, seventh book, “Rising Life Expectancy — a Global History.”
And the research that went into it no doubt heads the list of reasons why Riley, brother of John G. Riley and son of the late John and Julia Riley of Salisbury, has been named a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University.
That’s the highest honor the university gives a professor for research — and it was packaged with high praise at the annual Founders’ Day event.
“Riley is now universally accepted,” says John C. Caldwell, emeritus professor of demography at Australia National University and editor of Health Transition Review in a special program prepared for the occasion, “for having created and still leading a new field — the study of morbidity and its impact over historical time.”
In two books and a series of articles, Riley has illuminated the relationship between health and mortality, showing that increasing longevity did not always result in better health.
“In other words, one of the trade-offs for a longer life was a sicker one, at least until well into the 20th century,” says W. Peter Ward, professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
Findings like that have brought Riley acclaim from scholars around the globe.
“Our understanding of the very idea of what good health and long life meant have been altered because of the writings of James Riley,” writes John J. McCusker, a Distinguished Professor at San Antonio’s Trinity University. “His publications have earned him renown in academic communities well outside those usually influenced by the historian. He is a scholar of tremendous importance.”
Not that he anticipated any of that during his years growing up in Salisbury.
Back then he was busy playing Little League baseball for First Presbyterian Church at McDaniel Field where the Mahaley Avenue Food Lion shoppers now park (and learning his future didn’t lie in baseball) and never dreaming of becoming a history professor like his grandfather.
But after he graduated from Salisbury High School, he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his undergraduate and master’s degrees and his doctorate in European history — and married Sharyn and had Annicke, who now manages a fancy bed and breakfast and restaurant, and Andrew, who just started college — and settled into the life of a college professor teaching European history.
“But,” he says, “I became convinced that people were paying too little attention to other parts of the world than Europe and started teaching a survey course of world history in the late ’80s because I got interested in the things this book deals with.”
Two things, he says, pushed him that way.
One was going into class in the ’70s and trying to explain how much life expectancy had changed since 1800. How did that happen?
“One of the great achievements of the modern era is survival to old age,” he says, adding that only two changes have spread throughout the world — literacy and life expectancy.
The one that hasn’t spread is wealth.
“Almost everywhere,” he says, “life expectancy is better today than 50 years ago, AIDS not withstanding. In the countries hardest hit by AIDS — Haiti and a dozen or so countries in southern and eastern African — it’s getting worse, but elsewhere it has continued to improve.”
Today Japanese women have the highest life expectancy in the world — 84 years.
“That’s very high,” he says. “It doesn’t surprise me that it’s Japan, but it does surprise me that it’s that high.”
The United States ranks 23rd or 24th in life expectancy in the world.
“We fall very short. One reason we fall short is that we have so many groups that have low life expectancy.”
Talking to those students about the 18th and 19th centuries convinced him he needed to understand why the death rates declined.
The second thing that pushed him was a trip to Belgium in the mid ’80s.
In Antwerp, he visited a printers’ museum.
“And they happened to have on display a ledger showing payments into and out of a ‘chapel fund’ they used to pay benefits to people who worked there when they were sick and couldn’t draw wages and for burial costs when they died. That was in 1650.”
Sick pay. Benefits. In 1650!
That intrigued him. He had to look further, realizing that the existence of that ledger made it possible “to study health in a very intimate way that I had not realized could be done before.”
Few people were working on those issues then.
“Now,” he says, “lots and lots of people are working on this. The change is because of how important health has become because of degenerative diseases and long illnesses.
“The health of infants and children is much better than it used to be,” he says, “but the health of older people is not better. In some ways it’s worse. For instance, lung cancer was very unusual before tobacco use became a problem.”
Today, he points out, people live to an age in which they develop diseases that are unfamiliar, and as a result, society learns about them.
“We know more about Alzheimer’s disease today because people are living longer and have it.”
Now he’s interested in the big disparity in life expectancy between different groups in the United States.
“For some, it’s 60 years; for others, 85. People who are interested in this kind of thing — and I’m just one of many — don’t understand it yet.
“The United States spends about 14 percent of our income on health. We spend about twice as much as the Japanese, and we don’t get as much for that as we should in life expectancy.”
So he still has a lot of questions to answer.
“I’m now working on why some poor groups live longer than others. Some have high life expectancy.”
Why does Jamaica, which is so much poorer than the United States, have a life expectancy like that in this country?
He has fellowship money this semester and next year.
“So I can spend about 90 percent of my time on research.”
And who knows where that will take him next?
When he finds answers to questions, he wishes he could tell his parents.
“The first thought that crossed my mind,” he says, when he was awarded that Distinguished Professor honor, “was that I wanted to call Salisbury and tell Mom and Dad.”
Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com
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