Nutritional Status and Mortality in Eighteenth-century Europe
Author(s)
Post, John D.
Abstract
This chapter shows the relation between food shortage and growing endemic infections and epidemic diseases in eighteenth-century Europe. The author uses data from cross-national and regional examinations of the food shortages, epidemics, welfare crisis, and the mortality peaks to point out that the main link between the shortage of food and epidemic diseases was more social than nutritional: “the epidemic mortality derived more from social disarray than from dangerously lowered resistance to louse-borne infections, typhoid fever, and dysentery”.
