  The Farr-Bertillon law says that for all age-groups the death rate of married
people is lower than the death rate of people who are not married (i.e. single,
widowed or divorced). Although this law has been known for over 150 years, it
has never been established with great accuracy. This even let some authors
argue that it was a statistical artefact. It is true that the data must be
selected and analyzed with great care, especially for age groups of small size
such as widowers under 25. The observations reported in this paper were
selected and designed in the same way as experiments in physics, that is to say
with the objective of minimizing the error bars for all age-groups. It will be
seen that data appropriate for mid-age groups may be unsuitable for young age
groups and vice versa. The investigation led to the following results. (1) The
FB effect is basically the same for men and women, except that on average it is
about 20\% stronger for men. (2) There is a marked difference between single or
divorced persons on the one hand, for whom the effect is largest around the age
of 45, and widowed persons on the other hand, for whom the effect is largest
around the age of 25. (3) When different causes of death are distinguished, the
effect is largest for suicide and smallest for cancer. (4) For young widowers
the death rates are up to 10 times higher than for married persons of same age.
This extreme form of the FB effect will be referred to as the "young widower
effect." A possible connection between the FB effect and Martin Raff's "Stay
alive" effect for cells in an organism is discussed in the last section.
