Now, to complicate matters further, the symbols surrounding life and death are subject to change. In the 18th Century, death at a young age was not unusual.
Medicine was at a pretty low level of sophistication and disease claimed many in their first year of life. We knew little or nothing about the causes of disease, or their prevention or cure.
Whooping cough, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, cholera; all were killers of children. Throughout the 19th Century, our knowledge improved, but only slightly.
As many men died in the American Civil War from disease and infection as were killed outright for example. People tended to die in thirds.
About 1/3 of any year's deaths occurred during the first few years of life, say before age 5. The next third occurred before the age of 30, with the final third encompassing all the rest of the population.
Life expectancy was only about 45 by the beginning of the 20th Century.
Some new inventions and technologies, even though they may have been around for some time, began to affect life expectancy after the turn of the century.
Innoculation/vaccination, although discovered by Edward Jenner in the late 18th Century, were unreliable and to some extent unexplainable until the mid-Nineteenth Century with the discovery of bacteria by Louis Pasteur.
Epidemiology, the study of how diseases are spread didn't really reach a level of sophistication until the work of Walter Reed in the late 19th Century.
Once we had an understanding of what causes disease, how they are spread, and how they can be prevented, we could develop the necessary tools to put this knowledge into practice.
In World War I, nearly as many soldiers died of disease as died of wounds, but by World War II, with the advent of hygiene practices and anti-infective agents such as sulfa, a person wounded in battle had a good chance of surviving.
The same techniques that helped out the military also helped the civilian population. Better public sanitation in the form of sewage treatment helped virtually eliminate diseases like typhoid and diphtheria.
Draining swamps and controlling mosquito populations eliminated yellow fever and malaria. The causes of death changed as a result of the changes in knowledge and technology, which in turn changes our attitude toward death.
When death was a part of nature, and nature was beyond the control of man, death was simply part of the divine cycle. As we learned to control nature through science, we learned to control disease through science. Consequently, we expect science to answer other medical problems as well. One thing that the scientific community has so far been unable to determine is why do we die? We know the mechanisms of death - disease, accident, suicide, etc. but we don't know why it seems to be built into our genetic system that eventually we all must die. We walk into the doctor's office expecting him to know what is wrong and what to do. We s/he can't answer those questions, death becomes a failure. We tend to view death as the last dirty joke nature plays on us.