I genuinely can't think of a good (ie moral) reason to support the idea given how it is predicted to, and has been shown to, play out.
The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.
Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness. In spite of the vast amount of pills modern people take. So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.
The gilded age was no paradise and rose tinted views of the era just don't hold up to scrutiny.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...
Life expectancy at birth in the times before modern medicine has always been dragged down significantly by the huge rate of infant mortality. It was more common for a family to have 1-2 dead small children in their past than not. People who lived past 5 or 10 or so would often live to see 70 or so, and 80 or 90 year olds were not unheard of.
During the industrial revolution? I would expect so. At this point we're on the tail end of those improvements.
> Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness.
Life expectancy has been going up for a long time, but on the obesity front the advent of highly sugary foods thanks to food giants is a result of profiteering, not regulation, and people driving everywhere instead of getting exercise is not because of regulation (though it is due to city planning).
> So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.
Are you sincerely arguing that modern medicine isn't much of an improvement over snake oil medicine? The discovery of penicillin alone has saved literally billions* of lives, to say nothing of painkillers, modern surgical hygiene, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, just so so many improvements in healthcare. I can't take this argument seriously I'm afraid, I can only assume it's a post hoc rationalisation.
* hundreds of millions, I misremembered the number.
Speak for yourself. Most well read people associate it with urbanization (made possible by industrialization of agriculture) and huge standard of living improvements that came with the long tail of industrialization. Such "luxuries" as off the shelf clothing, meat products, electric lights, etc. etc became readily available to the common man at a price he could afford at that time.