Urbanisation and mortality in Britain c.1800-1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the long-running debate over standards of living during the Industrial Revolution, pessimists have identified deteriorating health conditions in towns as undermining the positive effects of rising real incomes on the ‘biological standard of living’. Here we review long-run historical relationships between urbanisation and epidemiological trends in England, and then address the specific question: did mortality rise especially in rapidly growing industrial and manufacturing towns in the period c.1830 – 1850? Using comparative data for British, European and American cities and selected rural populations we find good evidence for widespread increases in mortality in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. However this phenomenon was not confined to ‘new’ or industrial towns. Instead, mortality rose in the 1830s especially amongst young children (aged one to four years) in a wide range of populations and environments. This pattern of heightened mortality extended between c.1830 and c.1870, and coincided with a well-established rise and decline in scarlet fever virulence and mortality. Our evidence therefore supports claims that mortality worsened for young children in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but also indicates that this phenomenon was more geographically ubiquitous, less severe, and less chronologically concentrated, than previously argued.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".