A brief moment of thanks

In the words of another:

"If more of us are dying of cancer and heart disease, it’s because many, many fewer of us are dying from diptheria, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, rubella, plague, influenza, malaria, common bacterial infections, polio, typhus, childbirth, “childbed” (puerperal) fever, malnutrition, scurvy, &c... The more I learn about the distant past, the happier I am that I never had to live there.  I feel like I won the f^(king lottery every day of my life to have been born when and where I was born, a middle-class American in the late middle of the twentieth century.  ...  I will probably live to die of heart disease, or cancer, or kidney disease, or sclerosis of the arteries.  Hooray!  I’m not exactly looking forward to it, but I must acknowledge how relatively fortunate I have been to have survived this far."