Height, Health and History provides an invigorating statistical edge to many debates about the history of the human body itself.

Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.

Height, Health and History provides an invigorating statistical edge to many debates about the history of the human body itself.

In the maelstrom of current public health debate over the social determinants of health, this book offers a discussion on the roots of prevalent strains of thought on the matter. The author brings an independent perspective to bear on the debate.

The biology of people in the past is a rapidly expanding field of historical study. Our capacity to understand the biology of historical populations is experiencing remarkable developments on both theoretical and analytical fronts. Human Biology and History weaves together the fields of biology, archaeology, and anthropology in an exchange o

In 1949 the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) commissioned a film, eventually called Challenge. Science Against Cancer, as part of a major effort to recruit young scientists into cancer research. Both organizations feared that poor recruitment would stifle the development of the field at a time when funding for research was growing dramatically. The fear was that there would not be enough new young scientists to meet the demand, and that the shortfall would undermine cancer research and the hopes invested in it. Challenge aimed to persuade young scientists to think of cancer research as a career. This book is the story of that forgotten film and what it tells us about mid-twentieth century American and Canadian cancer research, educational filmmaking, and health education campaigns. It explores why Canadian and American health agencies turned to film to address the problem of scientist recruitment; how filmmakers turned such recruitment concerns into something they thought would work as a film; and how information officers at the NCI and DNHW sought to shape the impact of Challenge by embedding it in a broader educational and propaganda program. It is, in short, an account of the important, but hitherto undocumented, roles of filmmakers and information officers in the promotion of post-Second World War cancer research.

The effort of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being has led to the examination of nearly forgotten, centuries-old records from dusty archives in practically all the continents of the globe. French historians in the Annales tradition were among the first to adopt methods from physical anthropology and from the biological sciences, but the real expansion of the field dates from the pathbreaking work of Richard Steckel and Robert Fogel, which launched the discipline of anthropometric history on American soil Research has confirmed that physical stature is related to nutritional status and therefore to real family income, and thus to the general standard of living. Historians and development economists will find this line of research useful, as it informs us about the standard of living of members of society for whom data on wages are seldom available—women, children, aristocrats, farmers, and slaves. In addition, this research has shown that the biological standard of living may diverge from conventional indicators of welfare during the early stages of industrialization. Thus, per capita income is an ambiguous measure of welfare during some phases of growth, and it must be supplemented with data from other indicators, such as physical stature. The essays in this volume broaden our knowledge of the human effects of the momentous economic changes of the last two centuries, extending analysis to regions for which such information has been lacking, including Russia, Canada, Indonesia, Italy, and Spain.