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Evolución de la estatura media de varones adultos, de 20-21 años, en España y Francia. Cohortes de 1770 a 1980
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La estatura es utilizada por los pediatras y los antropólogos como medida de salud y bienestar de las poblaciones humanas. En las últimas décadas los historiadores la usan como indicador biológico del nivel vida para explorar el impacto producido por las transformaciones ambientales, sociales y económicas en el bienestar del pasado. Este artículo m...
Citations
... En una revisión sobre los estudios de crecimiento en España desde una perspectiva de la Antropología Física (Marrodán, 1987), se atribuye el primero a Hoyos Sainz (1892), seguido por Olóriz (1896). Martínez-Carrión (2011), se remonta más atrás en un exhaustivo artículo en el que adjudica el inicio de la antropometría española a médicos higienistas que se basaron en estadísticas sobre reclutas y que dieron lugar a varias publicaciones en la Gaceta de Sanidad Militar. ...
En España es escasa la información antropométrica relativa a series antiguas no basadas en tallas de reclutas. Por esto, se considera de interés la recuperación de una serie de datos individualizados e inéditos correspondientes a estudiantes universitarios de finales del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX elaborada por múltiples observadores. Se valora el error para este tipo de datos y se propone un procedimiento que lo minimice. La información procede de una colección de 1228 fichas antropométricas fechadas entre los años 1893 y 1920, que fueron cumplimentadas en el Laboratorio de Antropología del Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Madrid. Mediante la consideración conjunta de dos o más variables fue posible descartar como casos perdidos los errores más evidentes. Además, valores alejados más de 3 desviaciones estándar del promedio, fueron considerados casos perdidos. El fichero así depurado, en el caso de la estatura, muestra variaciones muy limitadas respecto al original por lo que se refiere a los parámetros de posición y de dispersión, siendo algo mayores para las anchuras corporales (biacromial y bicrestal). En cuanto a la forma de las distribuciones de datos, para la estatura la serie depurada no se aparta significativamente de la normalidad, mientras que, por el contario, las anchuras biacromial y bicrestal siguen haciéndolo después de dicha depuración.
ABSTRACT
Anthropometric data on ancient series of males not based on recruits' heights are scarce in Spain. For this, it is of interest the recovery of individualized and unpublished information corresponding to university students of ends of the 19th century and beginning of the XX th elaborated by multiple observers. The information comes from a collection of 1228 anthropometric cards dated between the years 1893 and 1920, which were completed in the Laboratory of Anthropology of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid. Wrong measurements were identified and minimized.
The Nutritional Transition describes the passage from a vegetarian, monotonous, local and inadequate diet to one based on the consumption of cereals, legumes, and potatoes but with a greater presence of meat, fruit, sugar and vegetable fats. This article, framed within the first stage of the nutritional transition, analyses the composition of the average diet in the city of Alcoy and compares it with the nutritional needs of the population, exploring the relationship between dietary changes and health indicators (e.g., height, mortality) during the industrial revolution. We compiled six diets for the period 1852-1928, finding a steady increase in the consumption of calories, proteins and carbohydrates in Alcoy over this time period, thereby initiating the nutritional transition that took place in the middle of the 19th century. Comparison of nutritional with health indictors showed that the gross increase in nutritional input was not always accompanied by an increase in height or decrease in mortality, due to the hard working conditions of the children and teenagers and due to an increase in morbidity linked to the urban overcrowding, lack of sewerage and poor quality of water and food. An increase in height and reduction in mortality did not take place until the end of the 19th century and early 20th century due to: a real increase in wages and in the supply of food, with the accompanying nutritional transition; the development of nutritional science; and the implementation of sanitary reform, improving the population's standard of living.
Many studies carried out on the evolution of the standard of living have shown that it is advisable to use several indicators as there is no single indicator that reflects all of the dimensions of well-being or that does so without incurring value judgements. Following this line of research, this study examines the well-being of the workers of Alcoy during the industrialisation process using four indicators: real wages, nutrition, life expectancy and height. As happened in other European industrialized regions some decades before, between 1870 and the end of the nineteenth century we can observe a “puzzle” as two indicators point to an increase in the standard of living and the other two reveal the opposite. The “puzzle” later disappears because from the beginning of the twentieth century to 1930 the four indicators show that well-being increased.
Objective: To explore the spatial pattern of nutritional status and its evolution between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Spain. This period precedes the nutrition transition and it was characterized by the high prevalence of malnutrition.
Methods: We use anthropometric data (province-level height means) from conscription in 1858 y 1913 as well as province-level means of height and weight from a large examination held among 119,571 soldiers in 1903-1906. These data are used to construct anthropometric cartography and descriptive statistics.
Results: The complexion of Spanish conscripts as indicated by height and weight measures was among the lowest in Europe prior to the nutrition transition in this country. Male average height increased only 1.43 cm between 1858 and 1913. During that period signifi cant changes in the anthropometric geography occurred in Spain which established a nutritional polarity on the eve of the World War I (WWI): inner and Southern
provinces exhibited higher incidence of malnutrition whereas provinces in the North and East of the country displayed anthropometric figures above the national average.
Conclusion: Spatial inequalities of nutritional status in Spain as r efl ected by anthropometric polarity may be largely associated with environmental
changes. Such changes are related to the modernization and industrialization processes in this country at the time that a relative backwardness (e.g. economic and technological), structural scarcity, occasional subsistence and high exposure to illness persisted. Our results underline the utility of anthropometric data to approach the living conditions of past population and the process of nutrition transition in particular.
This article presents an overview of the study of living standards in Spain from the perspective
of anthropometric history and new data from recent research. The aim is to examine
changes in nutrition during the industrial age through anthropometric indicators. The paper
provides new evidence on the changes in height among different socioeconomic groups and its
relation with health and human well-being in different periods and geographical regions. It
also explores inequality before and during the process of industrialisation. In addition to tracking
the effects of environmental changes on well-being and inequality between the proto-industrial
period in the eighteenth century and the industrial leap in the beginning of the second
half of the twentieth century, it explores the costs of industrialisation in biological standards
of living in the short- and the long-term. Finally, it suggests future directions of research.
The article presents and discusses long-run series of per capita GDP and
life expectancy for Italy and Spain (1861-2008). After refining the available estimates in
order to make them comparable and with the avail of the most up-to-date researches,
the main changes in the international economy and in technological and sociobiological
regimes are used as analytical frameworks to re-assess the performances of
the two countries; then structural breaks are searched for and Granger causality
between the two variables is investigated. The long-run convergence notwithstanding,
significant cyclical differences between the two countries can be detected: Spain began
to modernize later in GDP, with higher volatility in life expectancy until recent decades;
by contrast, Italy showed a more stable pattern of life expectancy, following early
breaks in per capita GDP, but also a negative GDP break in the last decades. Our
series confirm that, whereas at the early stages of development differences in GDP
tend to mirror those in life expectancy, this is no longer true at later stages of
development, when, if any, there seems to be a negative correlation between GDP and
life expectancy: this finding is in line with the thesis of a non-monotonic relation
between life expectancy and GDP and is supported by tests of Granger causality.
This article explores secular changes in the biological well-being of Europeans and relationships between economic growth and human development. With male height data of military recruitment and several national surveys on health and height-by-age data from the European Community Panel, heights trends in the last three centuries are reconstructed. The results show, on the one hand, the strong growth of the European population stature from the 1850s onwards, after a period of height deterioration with unequal intensity in the majority of countries between 1750 and 1850. On the other hand, it shows the persistence of territorial disparities in height since the eighteenth century. It demontrates the inequality was mainly associated to long-term environmental and socioeconomic factors. It concluded that the fantastic height increase was a physiological revolution linked to processes of economic growth, industrialization and urbanization, but mainly to improvements in nutrition, income, education, and public health.
