Simon Szreter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 337744 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Simon Szreter |
| NOMBRES | Simon |
| APELLIDO | Szreter |
| FIRMA | SZRETER S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6903-2447 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 522 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1984 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
The new poor law and the health of the population of England and Wales
We estimate the impact of reductions in poor law expenditure on rural life expectancy and mortality rates in England and Wales following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Given the scale of cuts imposed, our estimates imply 8-10 per cent increases in mortality at ages 1-4 years and 2-4 per cent falls in rural expectation of life at birth. This is consistent with the reformers' policy of reducing child allowances for larger families. These results …
Infant mortality and social causality
What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle-the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at the dawn of the previous century-as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local …
Covid-19 and a state in crisis
Covid-19, Poor Laws, Elizabeth I, collectivist individualism, Joseph Chamberlain, welfare systems, neoliberalism
How Seriously Should we Take Universal Basic Income
Is universal basic income (UBI) a policy idea whose time has come? Recent historical scholarship now enables us to comprehend the twentieth century evolution of this and similar ideas. UBI is intriguing in having vociferous backers drawn both from the libertarian right—such as, notably, Milton Friedman in the form of his negative income tax proposal—but also from the emancipation‐embracing left—such as Michel Foucault and Phillipe Van Parijs. In …
The pox in Boswell's London
This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is constructed, providing an indicator of over 20 per cent syphilitic infection. The principal primary sources are hospital admissions registers, augmented with an analysis of London's w…
Scarlet fever and nineteenth‐century mortality trends
Romola Davenport's recent article is presented as a significant revision of the interpretation of the reasons for rising and then falling urban mortality in Britain in the nineteenth century put forward by Szreter and Mooney, which emphasized the importance of the politics of public health. Davenport's claims that mortality patterns c . 1830–70 were driven by a synchronized rise and fall of scarlet fever across Europe and North America, as well a…
The Capacity to Surprise
"The Capacity to Surprise: On the Importance of History for Public Health Policy." , 110(3), pp. 337–338
Scotland's Populations from the 1850s to Today
We at last have a worthy sequel to Michael Flinn's (1977) edited collection, Scottish Population History from the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s. Michael Anderson's book squarely addresses and di
Marx on Population
Treatment rates for the pox in early modern England
This article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by Dr John Haygarth, it is possible to produce age-specific estimates of the extent to which adults of e…
Rebuttal to Barnes and Guinnane
Barnes and Guinnane's 'Rejoinder' repeats their previous argument that the professional model of fertility decline produces statistical results which they see as impressive. They continue to ignore the evidence presented in part II of Fertility, class and gender, summarized in my reply to their original article, that the design of the model is both conceptually flawed and methodologically incoherent. It is reaffirmed that therefore its statistica…
Labor and World Development Through the Lens of Cotton
“World history” is a vigorous new disciplinary perspective. It has emerged in the last decade or so as economic, postcolonial, and environmental historians bring their newfound willingness to study power and conflict into the global arena—not least in exploring the relationships between population change and economic growth and development. Models of demographic transition have typically assumed that there is a reciprocally beneficial relationshi…
Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective
Journal Article Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective Get access Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective, Rochester Studies in Medical History, Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2014. Pp.xiii + 338. £80. ISBN 978 1 5804 6508 3. Simon Szreter Simon Szreter University of Cambridge [email protected] Search for other works…
Demography, Early History of
Wealth, Population, and Inequality
Fertility, social class, gender, and the professional model
In 2012 Barnes and Guinnane published a revised statistical analysis of the critical evaluation of the official 1911 social class model of fertility decline that was presented in chapter 6 of Szreter's Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (FCG). They argue that the official model of five ranked social classes is, after all, a satisfactory statistical summary of the fertility variance found among the married couples of England and Wal…
The Prevalence of Syphilis in England and Wales on the Eve of the Great War
Public fears of widespread venereal disease led in 1913 to the appointment of The Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (RCVD). In 1916 its Final Report offered only a single cautious and somewhat imprecise summary statement about the likely prevalence of venereal diseases in England and Wales. Although the significance of contemporary attitudes to venereal disease has attracted a good deal of historiographic attention, no historian or demographe…
Pat Thane and Tanya Evans. Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England
This is an engaging study of the changing policies and practices that affected unmarried motherhood across the twentieth century. It is also a history of the growing advocacy and support role of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NC), founded in 1918. (It became the National Council for One Parent Families in 1973, and merged in 2007 with Gingerbread, the self-help support group founded in 1971.) This is a book that exem…
Registration And Recognition Documenting The Person In World History
Identity recognition of individuals by the groups they are born into or wish to affiliate themselves with has been a universal human experience but any registration documentation has received little scholarly attention. This introduction to a new subject presents a wide-ranging set of original studies of registration over 2000 years.
Angus MCLAREN. Reproduction by Design
Registration and Recognition
This book is a comparative investigation of different regional histories of registration — a feature of societies common across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, but poorly understood in contemporary social science. Identity recognition of individuals by the groups they are born into or wish to affiliate themselves with has been a ubiquitous phenomenon of human experience. It has left widespread records in the form of legal, civic, and religious re…
The Big Society Debate
Statistics and the public sphere
How and Why Does History Matter for Development Policy
The consensus among scholars and policy-makers that ‘institutions matter’ for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that ‘history matters’, since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This article endeavours to open and sustain a …
Welfare's forgotten past
The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline c .1850–1914
The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline c.1850–1914: a Re-interpretation of the Role of Public Health Get access SIMON SZRETER SIMON SZRETER *Gonville and Caius CollegeCambridge CB2 1TA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 1, Issue 1, April 1988, Pages 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/1.1.1 Published: 01 April 1988
The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change
The position is argued that progress in the further study of fertility change rests on a reappraisal of the recent intellectual history of demography. Principally recognition needs to be given to the policy influences which were apparent even before the 1950s. The notion of demographic transition as merely a descriptive term is unproductive and impedes a wider range of approaches to the field. The discussion was an examination of the methodologic…
The Genesis of the Registrar-General's Social Classification of Occupations
Those empirical sociologists in Britain who are concerned with social classification have tended to avoid any detailed evaluation of the long-established and ubiquitous official system. Such a discussion is inhibited by our current state of ignorance regarding its historical origins. An investigation of the exact chronology of its development and elucidation of its author's intentions is, therefore, undertaken. This reveals a complex and protract…
The state of social capital
Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate
T he modern standard of living debate has been conducted throughout the last 40 years predominantly in the absence of any direct, detailed, and empirically based consideration of the mortality experience of the British working population during the industrial revolution era. 2 This is somewhat surprising in that, when setting out the basis for a 'pessimistic' view in his seminal contribution to the debate of 1957, Hobsbawm gave pride of place to …
Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death
Simon Szreter, Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development, Population and Development Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 693-728
The Right of Registration
Rethinking McKeown
Thomas McKeown was a rhetorically powerful critic, from the inside, of the medical profession's mid-20th-century love affair with curative and scientific medicine. He emphasized instead the importance of economic growth, rising living standards, and improved nutrition as the primary sources of most historical improvements in the health of developed nations. This interpretation failed to emphasize the simultaneous historical importance of an accom…
The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
From its earliest years the General-Register Office (GRO) developed a twin-pronged publication strategy to maximize both its political and scientific impact in promoting the environmentalist policies of the public health movement. Through its weekly and quarterly bulletins of comparative death-rates the GRO fought a relentless campaign to heighten local awareness of the extent of preventable death. The government's chief medical officer also used…
Reproduction, Compositional Demography, and Economic Growth
This article offers a radical reinterpretation of the chronology of control over reproduction in England's history. It argues that, as a result of post-World War II policy preoccupations, there has been too narrow a focus in the literature on the significance of reductions in marital fertility. In England's case this is conventionally dated to have occurred from 1876, long after the industrial revolution. With a wider angle focus on "reproduction…
The Population Health Approach in Historical Perspective
The origin of the population health approach is an historic debate over the relationship between economic growth and human health. In Britain and France, the Industrial Revolution disrupted population health and stimulated pioneering epidemiological studies, informing the early preventive public health movement. A century-long process of political adjustment between the forces of liberal democracy and propertied interests ensued. The 20th-century…
Mortality in England in the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries
In the last issue of Social History of Medicine, Sumit Guha published a critique of the thesis presented in Szreter (1988), which argued that an increasing weight and diversity of social interventions were primarily responsible for the reduction in Britain's mortality achieved from the 1870s. Previoiusly neglected and harmful urban, factory, and eventually even home environments were improved, as both political and social as well as scientific ap…
They Prefer Withdrawal
New findings from an oral-history research project investigating sexuality, marriage, and birth control among working-class couples born in the first quarter of the twentieth century run contrary to the family-planning and marriageguidance manuals of the period, as well to demographers' and historians' assumptions. These couples tended to prefer traditional methods of birth control, notably withdrawal, to more modern, mechanical, ones on the grou…
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940
The Official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France
In the course of the inter-war period, a particular empirical model of national social structure emerged in the official census publications of both Britain and the United States. In the postwar period the essential characteristics of this model subsequently became almost second nature for many English-speaking social and policy scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This 'professional model' of social structure took the following form when it…
Fertility, social class, gender, and the professional model
In 2012 Barnes and Guinnane published a revised statistical analysis of the critical evaluation of the official 1911 social class model of fertility decline that was presented in chapter 6 of Szreter's Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (FCG). They argue that the official model of five ranked social classes is, after all, a satisfactory statistical summary of the fertility variance found among the married couples of England and Wal…
We weren't the sort that wanted intimacy every night”
This article presents an exploration of qualitative evidence on the relationship between birth control and abstinence from an oral history project, which interviewed middle and working-class English men and women, who had married between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. Among the working classes the assumption that men were responsible for birth control choices and the disadvantages that contraceptive methods of all types posed, combined with …
The Prevalence of Syphilis in England and Wales on the Eve of the Great War
Public fears of widespread venereal disease led in 1913 to the appointment of The Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (RCVD). In 1916 its Final Report offered only a single cautious and somewhat imprecise summary statement about the likely prevalence of venereal diseases in England and Wales. Although the significance of contemporary attitudes to venereal disease has attracted a good deal of historiographic attention, no historian or demographe…
History, Policy and the Social History of Medicine
Journal Article History, Policy and the Social History of Medicine Get access Simon Szreter Simon Szreter * *St John's College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 22, Issue 2, August 2009, Pages 235–244, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkp006 Published: 02 June 2009
Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition
Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of "traditional" methods of birth control-such as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinence-throughout the period when fertility fell, though fertility fell in each case at a different point in time. These s…
Victorian Britain, 1831–1963
scheme of salvation at every point. He was a countercultural figure in his day, though he anticipated many of the views which became current after 1850.3
How Seriously Should we Take Universal Basic Income
Is universal basic income (UBI) a policy idea whose time has come? Recent historical scholarship now enables us to comprehend the twentieth century evolution of this and similar ideas. UBI is intriguing in having vociferous backers drawn both from the libertarian right—such as, notably, Milton Friedman in the form of his negative income tax proposal—but also from the emancipation‐embracing left—such as Michel Foucault and Phillipe Van Parijs. In …
Scarlet fever and nineteenth‐century mortality trends
Romola Davenport's recent article is presented as a significant revision of the interpretation of the reasons for rising and then falling urban mortality in Britain in the nineteenth century put forward by Szreter and Mooney, which emphasized the importance of the politics of public health. Davenport's claims that mortality patterns c . 1830–70 were driven by a synchronized rise and fall of scarlet fever across Europe and North America, as well a…
Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective
Journal Article Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective Get access Alexander Mercer, Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition. A New Perspective, Rochester Studies in Medical History, Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2014. Pp.xiii + 338. £80. ISBN 978 1 5804 6508 3. Simon Szreter Simon Szreter University of Cambridge [email protected] Search for other works…
Healthy Government? Britain, c . 1850–1950
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Genesis of the Registrar-General's Social Classification of Occupations
Those empirical sociologists in Britain who are concerned with social classification have tended to avoid any detailed evaluation of the long-established and ubiquitous official system. Such a discussion is inhibited by our current state of ignorance regarding its historical origins. An investigation of the exact chronology of its development and elucidation of its author's intentions is, therefore, undertaken. This reveals a complex and protract…
The British Fertility Decline
The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline c .1850–1914
The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline c.1850–1914: a Re-interpretation of the Role of Public Health Get access SIMON SZRETER SIMON SZRETER *Gonville and Caius CollegeCambridge CB2 1TA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 1, Issue 1, April 1988, Pages 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/1.1.1 Published: 01 April 1988
Introduction
Journal Article Introduction: The GRO and the Historians Get access SIMON SZRETER SIMON SZRETER *University of Cambridge, Faculty of History. West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9EF Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 4, Issue 3, December 1991, Pages 401–414, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/4.3.401 Published: 01 December 1991
The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
From its earliest years the General-Register Office (GRO) developed a twin-pronged publication strategy to maximize both its political and scientific impact in promoting the environmentalist policies of the public health movement. Through its weekly and quarterly bulletins of comparative death-rates the GRO fought a relentless campaign to heighten local awareness of the extent of preventable death. The government's chief medical officer also used…
Healthy Government? Britain, c . 1850–1950
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The European Experience of Declining Fertility
The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change
The position is argued that progress in the further study of fertility change rests on a reappraisal of the recent intellectual history of demography. Principally recognition needs to be given to the policy influences which were apparent even before the 1950s. The notion of demographic transition as merely a descriptive term is unproductive and impedes a wider range of approaches to the field. The discussion was an examination of the methodologic…
The Official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France
In the course of the inter-war period, a particular empirical model of national social structure emerged in the official census publications of both Britain and the United States. In the postwar period the essential characteristics of this model subsequently became almost second nature for many English-speaking social and policy scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This 'professional model' of social structure took the following form when it…
Mortality in England in the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries
In the last issue of Social History of Medicine, Sumit Guha published a critique of the thesis presented in Szreter (1988), which argued that an increasing weight and diversity of social interventions were primarily responsible for the reduction in Britain's mortality achieved from the 1870s. Previoiusly neglected and harmful urban, factory, and eventually even home environments were improved, as both political and social as well as scientific ap…
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940
This book offers an original interpretation of the history of falling fertilities in Britain between 1860 and 1940. It integrates the approaches of the social sciences and of demographic, feminist, and labour history with intellectual, social, and political history. It exposes the conceptual and statistical inadequacies of the orthodox picture of a national, unitary class-differential fertility decline, and presents an entirely new analysis of th…
Why Birth Rates Fell
Victorian Britain, 1831–1963
scheme of salvation at every point. He was a countercultural figure in his day, though he anticipated many of the views which became current after 1850.3
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940
Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death
Simon Szreter, Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development, Population and Development Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 693-728
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940
Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940
British Population in the Twentieth Century
Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate
T he modern standard of living debate has been conducted throughout the last 40 years predominantly in the absence of any direct, detailed, and empirically based consideration of the mortality experience of the British working population during the industrial revolution era. 2 This is somewhat surprising in that, when setting out the basis for a 'pessimistic' view in his seminal contribution to the debate of 1957, Hobsbawm gave pride of place to …
Social Capital, the Economy, and Education in Historical Perspective
SOCIAL capital is an important new concept which, when added to the established, analytical categories already used by mainstream liberal economists, holds out the promise of a much superior understanding of the way in which real, rather than theoretical, market economies, businesses, and com petition function today and for the foreseeable future. It does this by explicitly incorporating, instead of excluding, the complex social, institutional an…
Reproduction, Compositional Demography, and Economic Growth
This article offers a radical reinterpretation of the chronology of control over reproduction in England's history. It argues that, as a result of post-World War II policy preoccupations, there has been too narrow a focus in the literature on the significance of reductions in marital fertility. In England's case this is conventionally dated to have occurred from 1876, long after the industrial revolution. With a wider angle focus on "reproduction…
Changing Family Size in England and Wales
This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included in the 1911 'fertility' census, they consider the interactions between the social, economic and phys…
Health, Class, Place and Politics
Rethinking McKeown
Thomas McKeown was a rhetorically powerful critic, from the inside, of the medical profession's mid-20th-century love affair with curative and scientific medicine. He emphasized instead the importance of economic growth, rising living standards, and improved nutrition as the primary sources of most historical improvements in the health of developed nations. This interpretation failed to emphasize the simultaneous historical importance of an accom…
Sociology (45 obras) · Political science (42 obras) · Population (29 obras) · Demography (28 obras) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (28 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (27 obras) · History (25 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Economics (20 obras) · Medicine (20 obras)