Human Demography and Disease

Integrated and novel approach to demographic and epidemiological studies of human populations.

Susan Scott (Author), C. J. Duncan (Author)

9780521620529, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 June 1998

372 pages, 141 b/w illus. 27 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.9 cm, 0.69 kg

'In their introduction, Scott and Duncan express the hope that their book will interest readers from the fields of theoretical population biology; demographic, economic, social, medical, agricultural, and geographic history; behaviour; and epidemiology. Because the book spans all these fields, it will be challenging but worthwhile reading for specialists in each of them. I commend it especially to graduate students who want an inspiring example of the use of fresh methods to stimulate fresh thoughts.' JAMA

Human Demography and Disease offers an interdisciplinary and integrated perspective on the relationship between historical populations and the dynamics of epidemiological processes. It brings the techniques of time-series analysis and computer matrix modelling to historical demography and geography to extract detailed information concerning the oscillations in births, deaths, migrations and epidemics from parish registers and other data series and to build mathematical models of the population cycles. This book presents a new way of studying pre-industrial communities and explores the subtle, and hitherto undetected effects of fluctuating nutritional levels on mortality patterns and the dynamics of infectious diseases. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students in the fields of demography, anthropology, historical geography, social history, population biology and epidemiology.

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Tools for demography and epidemiology
3. Identification of population oscillations: a case study
4. Density-dependent control and feedback
5. Modelling the endogenous oscillations and predictions from time-series analysis
6. Cycles in the grain price series
7. Interactions of exogenous cycles: a case study
8. Mortality crises and the effects of the price of wool
9. Modelling epidemics for the demographer: the dynamics of smallpox in London
10. Non-linear modelling of the two-yearly epidemics in smallpox: the genesis of chaos?
11. Measles and whooping cough in London
12. Integration of the dynamics of infectious diseases with the demography of London
13. Smallpox in rural towns in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
14. Infectious diseases in England and Wales in the nineteenth century
15. Prospectives - towards a meta-population study
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Human biology [PSX], Population & demography [JHBD]