The Sickness Experience of the Josselins' Children

In: Journal of family history: studies in family, kinship and demography, Band 14, Heft 4, S. 347-363

Abstract

For some forty years the seventeenth-century clergyman and farmer Ralph Josselin kept a diary. Among the events that he recorded regularly were the occasions when one or another of his ten children fell ill. Combining the experience of the ten children—136 disease and injury episodes within 148.3 years at risk—shows a distinctive pattern of morbidity risk from birth to age twenty. Josselin's diary allows consideration of some other issues in childhood health, including maladies linked to immune system damage and the weanling crisis. The health experience of the Josselins' children is also compared on some points to that of children living in Third-World areas in recent decades.