5 - Height, health, and mortality in continental Europe, 1700–2100

Summary

The previous chapter examined long-term changes in health and welfare in England and Wales since circa 1700 and explored their implications for the future. The present chapter extends these ideas to different parts of continental Europe. Section 5.1 looks at long-term trends in height, weight, and (where possible) BMI, and Section 5.2 examines the main changes in mortality rates. Section 5.3 presents a brief overview of the main changes in environmental and nutritional conditions in different parts of Europe since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Section 5.4 examines the relationship between improvements in health and economic growth. The final section assesses the implications of these changes for health in later life and future trends in life expectancy.

The anthropometric history of continental Europe

Although anthropometric historians have recently begun to examine very long-run changes in human stature from skeletal remains (Steckel 2003), we possess very little information about the heights of Europeans who were measured while they were still alive before the early eighteenth century. However, Komlos (2003) has unearthed data relating to the heights of French army recruits who were born during the second half of the seventeenth century. These men were extremely short by modern European standards and the height data confirm the traditional view that the seventeenth century was a time of considerable and sustained hardship in many parts of Europe (de Vries 1976). However, some of Komlos's other results are rather more surprising.