It has often been recognised that the average height of a population is influenced by the economic, social and environmental conditions in which it finds itself, and this insight has inspired a ...generation of historians to use anthropometric data to investigate the health and wellbeing of past populations. This paper reviews some of the main developments in the field, and assesses the extent to which height remains a viable measure of historical wellbeing. It explores a number of di erent issues, including the nature of human growth; the impact of variations in diet and exposure to disease; the role of ethnicity; the relationships between height, mortality and labour productivity; and the “social value” of human stature. It concludes that, despite certain caveats, height has retained its capacity to act as a “mirror” of the conditions of past societies, and of the wellbeing of their members.
The Changing Body Floud, Roderick; Fogel, Robert W.; Harris, Bernard ...
03/2011
eBook
Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and ...demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.
Heliophysics data analysis often involves combining diverse science measurements, many of them captured as time series. Although there are now only a few commonly used data file formats, the ...diversity in mechanisms for automated access to and aggregation of such data holdings can make analysis that requires intercomparison of data from multiple data providers difficult. The Heliophysics Application Programmer's Interface (HAPI) is a recently developed standard for accessing distributed time series data to increase interoperability. The HAPI specification is based on the common elements of existing data services, and it standardizes the two main parts of a data service: the request interface and the response data structures. The interface is based on the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) or RESTful architecture style, and the HAPI specification defines five required REST endpoints. Data are returned via a streaming format that hides file boundaries; the metadata is detailed enough for the content to be scientifically useful, e.g., plotted with appropriate axes layout, units, and labels. Multiple mature HAPI-related open-source projects offer server-side implementation tools and client-side libraries for reading HAPI data in multiple languages (IDL, Java, MATLAB, and Python). Multiple data providers in the US and Europe have added HAPI access alongside their existing interfaces. Based on this experience, data can be served via HAPI with little or no information loss compared to similar existing web interfaces. Finally, HAPI has been recommended as a COSPAR standard for time series data delivery.
Health and Development Borowy, Iris; Harris, Bernard
De Gruyter eBooks,
2023, Volume:
2
eBook
Open access
Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments. 11 ...case studies from 9 countries on 3 continents since the late 19th century show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.
William Beveridge's report on Social insurance and allied services has often been described as a ‘blueprint’ for the creation of Britain's post‐war welfare state. However, it was only one of three ...major reports which Beveridge produced during the 1940s. This paper looks at all three reports and places them in the context of Beveridge's other writings and developments in the history of British social policy. It explores the different ways in which Beveridge's ideas about the importance of individual liberty, the role of state intervention and the different forms of voluntary action intersected during this period.
Previous authors have drawn attention to the role played by loan-financed public works in reducing mortality in England and Wales during the latter part of the nineteenth century. These arguments ...have often been based on an analysis of the loans sanctioned by the Government's central health departments following the creation of the first General Board of Health in 1848, but little attempt has been made to disaggregate the loans either by function or geographical area. Moreover, as the Local Government Board itself acknowledged, it is also important to take account of the large number of loans which were approved by other means. This paper offers the first large-scale chronological account of the full range of loans which were either approved by Local Act of Parliament or sanctioned by a central department throughout the whole of the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of the First World War. Although it largely supports the outline provided by previous research, it draws new attention to the importance of the loans which were authorised in the wake of the US Civil War in the 1860s. It also explores the relationship between these loans and the decline of mortality in areas which have previously been identified as 'high-performing and high-contributing areas' to Britain's late nineteenth-century mortality decline, and makes an initial attempt to link these loans to the improvements which occurred.
As the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws noted in 1909, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 sprang from rather different motives. Whereas the first Act aimed to ...restrict the provision of poor relief, the second was designed to enhance it. However, despite these aims, it is generally accepted that Scotland's Poor Law continued to relieve a smaller proportion of its population and to spend less money on them. This paper revisits the evidence on which these claims are based. Although the gap between the two Poor Laws was less than previously supposed, it was nevertheless substantial. The paper also explores the links between the size of Scottish parishes and welfare spending, and demonstrates that the main reasons for the persistence of the spending gap were related to different levels of investment in poorhouses and workhouses, and support for the elderly.
This paper introduces a special issue of The History of the Family on sanitation and urban mortality. The special issue contains papers which focus on the impact of sanitary reforms on mortality ...change in Australia, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and England and Wales. The current paper outlines the main features of the debate over the causes of mortality change and the role played by sanitary reforms in this. It then highlights some of the methodological and other challenges posed by the definition of 'urban' areas, the identification of relevant sanitary reforms, and the choice of dependent variables. The paper then proceeds to summarise the main features of the individual papers before drawing some conclusions for future research.
This paper presents a new analysis of the contribution of particular causes of death to the decline of mortality in England and Wales between 1851 and 1910. We examine deaths in a set of 588 ...registration areas based on the registration districts but amalgamated where necessary so that the boundaries of the areas are consistent over time. The deaths are classified by cause, and the paper discusses changes in the classification of causes of death between 1851 and 1910 and attempts to use as congruent a set of classes as is possible. The results show that declines in deaths from waterborne diseases and scarlet fever had their greatest impact between the 1860s and the 1880s, pulmonary tuberculosis declined steadily throughout the period, and diseases of the lungs were important between the 1890s and 1901-1910. The paper then examines cause-specific death rates in urban and rural areas, using definitions of 'urban' based on both population density and settlement size. The results are largely insensitive to the definition of what constitutes an urban area. They reveal that mortality from typhus/typhoid and pulmonary tuberculosis declined in parallel in urban and rural areas. Mortality from scarlet fever converged to very low levels in all areas by 1901-1910. There were, however, differences between town and countryside in the pace and timing of the decline of mortality from diarrhoeal diseases. Where there were differences, it was often the smaller urban areas that stood apart: there was no gradation from rural areas through small towns to larger towns. The paper concludes with some remarks on the implications of our findings for the role of public investment in mortality decline.
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