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Title: Public Assistance, Mortality, and Morbidity: Can We Learn Anything from History?
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2003
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Abstract: City life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was dirty and dangerous (Melosi 2000). The water and milk supply of cities was contaminated with bacteria causing typhoid fever, dysentery, and diarrhea. Cities did not remove sewage and their streets were filled with garbage and carrion. The influx of migrants from abroad and from rural areas crowding into dank and dark urban tenements provided new foci of infection and new victims, and the rapid transmission of disease from host to host increased its virulence. Among infants the excess urban mortality was 88 percent in 1890 and 48 percent in 1900 (Haines forthcoming) and nowhere was the urban mortality penalty as large as in the poor areas of town where crowding was greater and where parents could not afford to buy clean water and milk (Rochester 1923). City life left those who survived to age 60 permanently scarred, shortening their lives at older ages even controlling for later residential moves (Costa 2003; Costa and Lahey 2003). But, by 1940, the urban mortality penalty had disappeared and life in a city was in many ways healthier tha n life in the countryside (Haines forthcoming). Between 1902 and 1929, the urban waterborne death rate had fallen by 88% (Cain and Rotella 2001)...
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Authors: Costa, Dora L.; Kahn, Matthew
Conference Name: Berkeley Symposium on Poverty, the Distribution of Income, and Public Policy: A Conference Honoring Gene Smolensky
Publisher Location: Berkeley, CA
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Other
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