the professor mentions as an aside (there is a transcript of the talk)
> And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today.
Females had the risk if child birth, an area where medicine did do a lot.
It shows that sanitation/hygiene and food seem to have done a lot for lower mortality outside the risk factors of being very young and/or giving birth.
And that was before antibiotics! Which is nice to know when we get another doom article about the end of antibiotics, because it seems that while sure individuals will suffer it by no means warrants predictions of doom for mankind.
http://www.richardcarrier.info/lifetbl.html
In the US in 1900, a 20 year old could expect to live to ~62:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
Today, a 20 year old can expect to make it to about 80.
So the gains aren't really limited to infant and child mortality. A substantial portion of the gain has certainly come from improvements there though.