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@WTFPurpleAlpaca @sickburnbro You're of course right, but modern Leftism didn't start out with such a high fear of death due to its omnipresence in the bad old days of the French Revolution and then still a great deal in the 19th Century.

Sure, public health measures including clean water and sanitary sewers, better medicine like antiseptics in the later middle of it (we had to develop the germ theory of disease) did a lot statistically to increase lifespans, but see for example what crushed Calvin Coolidge. His son followed an all too familiar path, played tennis without socks because he was in a hurry, got an infection, and the best of US medicine at the time couldn't save him and he died in a time easily measured in days.

The development of safe and effective anti-microbials starting with the sulfa drugs in the 1930s and then antibiotics in the 1940s, first available to civilians in 1946, effected a sea change which was probably capped with polio vaccines. People now reasonably expect healthy infants and themselves to live a long time, generally at least into their sixties, and there are often clues if you won't, or will die sooner than "normal."