Famine, Mortality, and Epidemic Disease in the Process of Modernization

Bibliographic Data

ID3217013
AuthorsJohn D Post (Northeastern University, corresponding author)
Year1976
Volume29
Issue1
Pages14-37
Publication date1976-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Economic History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-0289.1976.tb00238.x
PMID11614418
OpenAlexW1990898303
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited3

A FUNDAMENTAL change occurred in the demographic experience of Europe after the I 740's: subsistence crises no longer produced major mortality peaks. Since the middle decades of the eighteenth century death from natural causes has never again taken such a heavy toll. Pierre Goubert has posed the problem of causation by his summary statement: Something had changed, whether in the nature, level, yield or cost of production, the speed or cost of transportation, the resources of the consumer or perhaps in government policy.' While few historians today assume that medical advance was a major factor in the levelling of mortality peaks, the continuous improvement of economic and social conditions, and especially the abatement of famines, have generally been accepted as the explanation for the decline of epidemics. A few authors, nonetheless, have remained sceptical of the thesis that the conquest of epidemic disease derived from improved economic productivity. There is, moreover, a set of unresolved problems to which Louis Henry alluded in his observation: We still do not know whether this reduction in disasters was produced by man, the result for instance of economic progress, or whether it was just a piece of good luck.2 Jean Meuvret questioned the automatic progression from dearth to mortality, and suggested that in some cases famine and epidemic disease have operated independently of one another.3 More recentlyJ. D. Chambers argued that preindustrial death-rates were relatively autonomous, and that epidemic cycles times overrode Malthusian factors. Chambers carried his case to the point of questioning the medical concept that under-nutrition and malnutrition interfere with the ability to resist infectious contagion, acknowledging, however, that nutritional deficiencies will exacerbate endemic illnesses like tuberculosis.4 Since European famines were not invariably followed by serious epidemics, it is possible that plague and similar crises of public health were essentially biological in origin and not directly related to problems of subsistence. Thus Fernand Braudel has stated that every disease has its own autonomous life, independent of the endless historians suggest, and that correlations with economic crises are at most only minor accidents in a history linked with other factors; while E. A. Wrigley has spoken of the apparently fortuitous incidence

Development economics · Disease · Economic growth · Economics · Famine · Geography · Modernization theory · Process (computing) · Computer Science · Global Health Care Issues · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Health and Conflict Studies · Historical and modern epidemiology studies · Internal Medicine · Medicine

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