Dicing with Death by Stephen Senn

Author:Stephen Senn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Deceased, Tunbridge Wells3*

Tunbridge Wells, as we saw in Chapter 2, was where Thomas Bayes was a minister when he wrote his famous treatise. This has nothing to do with its appearance here. Queen Anne – who, through her indefatigable production of short-lived progeny, must have done more than any other monarch to depress the expectation of life for royalty – complained about the dangerous conditions underfoot in Tunbridge Wells on a Royal visit to what was to become the Pantiles.4 John Arbuthnot was her physician. None of this is of relevance either. What is relevant, however, is that it just so happens that my first job was working for the Tunbridge Wells Health District (1975–1978) and during my time there I constructed a life-table for the District, which I now propose to discuss.

As is the modern practice, I produced a separate table for males and females. I hope that the good ladies of Tunbridge Wells will forgive me, but for reasons of brevity I shall present the results for gentlemen only. These are given in Table 7.1.

The values are at five-year intervals and each row is deemed to apply to an individual male who has the exact age given by the first column. The second column gives the probability that a given male will fail to see five further birthdays. The radix of the table is the first entry in the third column and is 100 000, so we can imagine that we follow 100 000 males from birth. Subsequent entries give the numbers of the original ‘cohort’ of 100 000 who survive to the given age. By multiplying this number by the corresponding value of qx we can calculate how many we expect to die before the next row of the table is reached and this gives us the number of deaths, dx. Thus, for example, 77 115 survive to age 65, their probability of dying before age 70 is 0.1571 so that 0.1571 × 77 115 = 12 115 are expected to die in the five years between exact ages 65 and 70. Obviously, by subtracting this number from the current entry in the lx column we get the next entry. Thus, 77 115 – 12 115 = 65 000. In this way all the values in columns three and four can be constructed starting with the first entry of column three (100 000) and using the appropriate values of qx in column two.

Table 7.1 Life expectancy for males, Tunbridge Wells Health District, 1971.

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