The creation of the Spanish public hospital system during Franco’s dictatorship was marked by collaboration and competition with the private sector, due to limited funding and political struggles among elites.
Both plague and smallpox used to exert a heavy death toll on society. We eradicated smallpox with a vaccine, but plague disappeared from most of human society for unknown reasons.
Discriminatory practices against girls reduced their survival chances during the 19th century and early 20th century, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe.
Using a novel measure of healthcare inequality, this research shows that the 1918 Influenza epidemic in South Africa exacerbated existing large racial inequalities in access to institutionalized medical treatment.
The Dutch Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java used forced labor to cultivate cash crops. This contribution argues that this colonial institution had important negative effects on the local peasantry’s health.
Using newly collected evidence for colonial Zambia and Cameroon, we show how strong and lasting the effects of historical investments in education and healthcare are in explaining contemporary outcomes.
This contribution presents an innovative research project, titled Lifting the burden of disease, based on the individual level cause-of-death data for the city of Amsterdam between 1854 and 1940. These data create a unique historical laboratory in which we can study epidemiological change and its determinants.
Does rapid urbanization cause rising mortality and worsening sanitation? Nineteenth-century Britain is often used as the classic exemplar of this problem, however we find little evidence that mortality rose in English cities during the Industrial Revolution.
Using rich historical data from the London Foundling Hospital 1892-1919, I find that malnutrition did not affect whether individuals contracted infectious diseases, but it did influence sickness severity from measles.
