k and r

another died of "exhaustion"..another from "the ague"... These folks died in the late 1800's..

medicine has come a long way

and "ague" is malarial fever.

that our mental healthcare system fails so many and that so many feel so utterly hopeless that they take their own life; it says a lot about where we are as a society. And none of it is good.

It's just that other causes have been bumped off the list - but the rate is basically unchanged.

Notice the cutoff point of the top 10 in 1900 vs. today.

Quite a change once antibiotics came into being.

Or is that something else?

Before that, "senility" or "senile dementia" was the general usage.

As a result, I never knew them.

The mathematician Edouard Lucas was cut on the cheek by a flying shard of china after a waiter dropped a stack of plates, and died of a resultant infection.

Some famous author -- can't remember now who it was -- toasted his daughter's marriage, smashed the glass in the fireplace, and when cleaning up the shards cut himself on the finger. The subsequent infection turned septic, killing him.

Just think what a tube of good old Neosporin could have sold for back then.

IMO, antibiotics are one of the greatest inventions of all times.

3 of my grandparents first spouses or fiances died (1 of tuberculosis, 1 of influenza, and 1 in WW1) and and they remarried. Without their deaths, I wouldn't have been produced.

In your family, though, it worked out well since you are one the results. Neither my paternal grandmother nor maternal grandfather ever remarried.

The rise in deaths from cancer is almost exclusively due to the fact that people are surviving other hazards for so long that the risk of getting cancer at some point in their lives is increasing -- just because their lives are longer. The actual incidence of cancer among any particular age group has been pretty constant (CAVEAT: after effects of smoking are accounted for), and dianosis and treatment have been happening earlier, which leads to improved survival rates.

I highly recommend Mukherjee's "Emperor of All Maladies", which was even made into a Ken Burns film, to get an idea of where cancer incidence and treatment stands today.

ETA: The big jump in cancer between 1900 and 1960 was almost entirely due to smoking, which had become socially acceptable even for women, and which was given a huge boost during WWI and WWII by provisioning troops with all the cigarettes they could smoke. Smoking is still responsible for about a third of all cancer deaths.

"There is strong evidence that eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight can help lower cancer risk..."

- U.S. National Library of Medicine
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002096.htm

What are the key statistics about liver cancer?

The American Cancer Society’s estimates for primary liver cancer and intrahepatic bile duct cancer in the United States for 2015 are:

About 35,660 new cases (25,510 in men and 10,150 in women) will be diagnosed
About 24,550 people (17,030 men and 7,520 women) will die of these cancers
The percentage of Americans developing liver cancer has been rising slowly for several decades.

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/livercancer/detailedguide/liver-cancer-what-is-key-statistics

It does not appear you do. (Here's a hint: click the "What are the risk factors for liver cancer?" hyperlink on the page you just provided.)

We keep more people alive, for longer periods of time, and more of us do more things during that time. Renewables will only change that problem, not solve it.

Heart disease shot up in 1960 from 1900, went down in 2010, but still higher than 1900. Cancer, higher each time. Diabetes, not on the list in 1900, but higher in the other two lists. Alzheimer's is new to 2010, as is suicide.

Some of that is diagnosing things that maybe weren't previously, but that's part of the issue; there's always a new problem to find. Which goes back to the environmental issues. Deaths from influenza and pneumonia, way down, but that comes at the cost of something else. Maybe polar bears, who knows.

If we're living on a finite planet, then everything is sort of give and take.

everything from cleaner public water supplies to the greater availability of soap to those pesky signs in restrooms warning all employees to wash their hands. When people weren't aware of germs, they didn't pay so much attention to hygiene; they needed to be educated into better habits. Nowadays we have a tendency to go overboard with antiobiotic cleansers and the like, but note that diphtheria and gastrointestinal infections vanished as categories after 1900, and all infectious diseases declined in both intervals. We now consider a certain degree of personal cleanliness to be "comnon sense", but without an understanding of how infectious agents are transmitted, it just didn't mean much to most people.