Guha S
Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India.
Soc Hist Med. 1994 Apr;7(1):89-113. doi: 10.1093/shm/7.1.89.
This paper examines the first phase of England's mortality decline, which commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, and proceeded fitfully down to the end of the nineteenth. It finds that recent research in population history has weakened the explanation known as the McKeown thesis, but that the alternative synthesis, developed by Szreter, does not stand up well to a scrutiny of the evidence on infant mortality and morbidity. It concludes by pointing out that, contrary to the received version, diarrhoeal diseases continued in defiance of late-Victorian public health measures, but appear to have become less lethal, sharing in the general decline in the lethality of illness found by J. C. Riley for the second half of the nineteenth century.
本文考察了英国死亡率下降的第一阶段，这一阶段始于18世纪中叶，断断续续地持续到19世纪末。研究发现，近期人口史研究削弱了被称为麦克基翁论点的解释，但斯雷特提出的另一种综合观点，在仔细审视婴儿死亡率和发病率证据时也站不住脚。文章最后指出，与普遍观点相反，腹泻疾病不顾维多利亚时代晚期的公共卫生措施依然存在，但致死率似乎有所降低，与J.C.莱利发现的19世纪下半叶疾病致死率普遍下降的情况相符。
