Abstract
In 1953 together with a colleague (Benjamin and Logan) the author called attention to a paper by Haenzel (1950) describing a new index of mortality years of life lost.The argument was that many people were living for more than the three score and ten years and that every earlier death represented a loss of potential further years of life; that adding up the total years of life lost might be a significant measure of the toll of largely preventable disease; that changes in this total year by year would maximize the improvement gained by curative and especially preventative medicine.

This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit: