Nutrition and Disease

The Case of London, 1550-1750

Bibliographic Data

ID3232264
AuthorsAndrew B Appleby, Andrew Β Appleby (corresponding author)
Year1975
Volume6
Issue1
Pages1
Publication date1975-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/202822
PMID11632274
OpenAlexW2314241488
LanguageEN
Citations received22

Nutrition and Disease: The Case of London, I550-1750 Historians of early modern Europe have often detected a connection between harvest failure and epidemic disease. Helleiner, for example, has written that subsistence crises invariably engendered epidemic in late medieval Europe. Bowden, speaking of in Tudor England, noted that striking coincidence of serious outbreaks with harvest failures . . leaves no doubt that these two events were closely related. Contemporaries confirmed the relationship: first dearth and then plague was a common saying of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Meuvret has pointed out.' It is easy to reconstruct the process. Following a harvest failure, food prices rose and the poor became progressively malnourished. They ate less and what they ate was worse, as they devoted their limited incomes to grain-which provided the most calories per penny-rather than to a better-balanced but more expensive diet of grains, meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables.2 Malnourishment lowered resistance to disease, allowing a disease already present endemically to grow to epidemic size or providing fertile territory for an epidemic introduced from outside. The

Disease · Environmental health · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Gerontology