Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity

Robert W. Fogel is Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr Fogel was the joint winner (with Douglass North) of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993. He is the author of several books, including The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2002). He co-authored The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

• 1. Foreword Stanley Engerman; 2. Secular changes in American and British stature and nutrition; 3. Second thoughts on the European escape from hunger: famines, chronic malnutrition, and mortality rates; 4. Trends in physiological capital: implications for equity in health care; 5. Changes in disparities and chronic diseases through the course of the twentieth century; 6. Some common problems in analysis and measurement; 7. Afterword: a conversation with the author.

'Initially met with skepticism, anthropometric history has, over the past decades, become established as an important tool in studies of long-term changes in health and well-being, largely due to the work of Robert Fogel. This comprehensive collection of essays, written over a period of 25 years, gives new students an excellent overview of his contribution to the field, which has inspired many of us. Each essay shows Fogel's eminent ability to develop a synthesis based on a diversity of data, sometimes rich, sometimes meager. The story of how first food, then environment, and now lifestyles determine the length of our lives is compelling, if not without challenge.' Tommy Bengtsson, Lund University