The History of Infant, Child and Adult Mortality in London, 1550–1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper uses a range of sources — parish registers, family histories, bills of mortality, local censuses, marriage licences, apprenticeship indentures, and wills — to document the history of mortality of London in the period 1538–1850. The main conclusions of the research are as follows:1. Infant and child mortality more than doubled between the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century in both wealthy and non-wealthy families.2. Mortality peaked in the middle of the eighteenth century at a very high level, with nearly two-thirds of all children — rich and poor — dying by their fifth birthday.3. Mortality under the age of two fell sharply after the middle of the eighteenth century, and older child mortality decreased mainly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century about 30 per cent of all children had died within the first five years. This latter fall in mortality appears to have occurred equally amongst both the wealthy and the non-wealthy population.4. There was little or no change in paternal mortality from 1600 to 1750, after which date there was a steady reduction until the middle of the nineteenth century. The scale of the fall in adult mortality was probably less than the reduction in infant and child mortality. The latter more than halved between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereas paternal mortality fell by about a third in the same period.5. There appears to have been a minimal social class gradient in infant, child and adult mortality in London during the period 1550–1850. This is an unexpected finding, raising fundamental questions about the role of poverty and social class in shaping mortality in this period.6. Although migration played a leading role in fostering the population increase in London in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relatively low infant and child mortality made a major contribution to population growth during this period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".