Suchergebnisse

This important collection of Margaret Pelling's essays brings together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England - including a number published here for the first time. They show that - then as now - health and medical care were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart era. Margaret Pelling's book brings this vital dimension of the early modern world in from the periphery of specialist study to the heart of the concerns of social, economic and cultural historians.

ABSTRACTJohn Graunt's pioneering study,Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality (1662)has been overlooked as a source for ideas about the importance of child mortality in an urban environment. Graunt seems to have been the first to arrive at an infant mortality rate (IMR), but this has been little explored. Graunt helped to define 'the urban penalty', but not in terms of the IMR. The article explains Graunt's focus on other aspects of urban mortality in relation to his need to reassure those in government, his methodology, and above all his gender. For context, the article looks at attitudes to childhood among members of the influential Hartlib circle of reformers, with which Graunt was connected. These male writers were greatly concerned about children, but seem to have shared with Graunt the traditional idea that children under the age of about seven were the responsibility of women.

Les écrivains anglais et les autorités municipales du seizième siècle étaient tout à fait conscients des coûts économiques et sociaux de las maladie chez les pauvres. Certains recensements des pauvres, tels que celui effectué à Norwich, enregistraient systématiquement les cas de maladie. Les contraintes historiques des estimations faites pour le début de l'ère moderne trouvent un équivalent dans celles d'aujourd'hui. La mortalité facilite l'évaluation quantitative, mais en obtenant au moins un minimum de morbidité, l'historien se rapproche de l'expérience de privation autant que de crise et obtient une image plus précose des premières politiques sociales.