Rising life expectancy has been suggested as one of the determining factors of the start of modern economic growth, On the basis of information relating to elite groups, economic historians have thereby questioned the idea, prevalent among most demographers, that life expectancy was rather stable until around 1800. There still is a scarcity of data on the long-term evolution of life expectancy that can support this claim. We present data on medical professionals in the Netherlands to study the evolution of life expectancy at age 25 in birth cohorts from the sixteenth till the beginning of the twentieth centuries. We compare the medical professions with groups without formal medical knowledge,-clergymen, visual artists, notable Dutch people, and members of the nobility and patriciate-thereby providing clues for the role that medicine has played as a factor behind the mortality decline. We use event history models to estimate the length of life. We observed very strong increases in survival in all selected groups, starting in cohorts born in the seventeenth century. The medical profession was no exception to this trend yet the rise in life expectancy in the profession did not surpass that of other groups. Thus, medical knowledge for a long time seems to have provided only limited advantages to those who possessed it.

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