Living Standards and Plague in London, 1560-1665

Interpreting adult stature in industrial London

“…Differences in juvenile mortality may only partially explain the pattern found here, however. Prior to industrialization London's population was subjected to catastrophic mortality as the result of a cycle of highly virulent plagues, beginning with the Black Death (1348–1350) and ending with the Great Plague (1665; DeWitte and Wood, ; Cummins et al, ), which may have impacted stature variation. Though it was originally thought that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, it has since been determined that plague mortality was actually selective.…”

“…The Black Death targeted individuals, particularly males, with evidence of previous stress (DeWitte and Wood, ; DeWitte, ), including those who were short statured (DeWitte and Hughes‐Morey, ). Mortality from the plague decreased over time, but this decrease favored the wealthy (Cummins et al, ). This could have lead to reduced stature variation between the social strata in the period leading up to the industrial revolution, as the shortest individuals may have already been targeted by selection for hundreds of years.…”

Model-based analysis of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Cairo in 1801

“…This mortality is relatively low compared with some of the famous outbreaks of bubonic plague that occurred previously towards the end of the second pandemic, for example, approximately 50% in Genoa and Naples in 1656, approximately 20% in London in 1665 and approximately 40% in Marseilles in 1720 [12,16,17]. The third plague pandemic that started in the 1890s in China caused lower mortality rates, presumably as a result of improving housing conditions and public health practices [12].…”

“…In Western Europe, the second pandemic lasted until the end of the seventeenth century, with the Marseilles plague of 1720 being an exceptionally late outbreak [16]. For example, in England, the last major outbreak took place in 1665 in London and a few secondary locations [17,18]. Finally, a third pandemic started around 1855 which ravaged China and India for almost a century, and during which the causative bacteria Y. pestis was discovered as well as its flea-borne mode of transmission [19].…”

Editor’s Introduction to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death

“…In-progress work by Bruce Campbell (2013) suggests that major climatic As for the end date of the Second Pandemic, we clearly must look well beyond 1353. For Western Europe, we have long known that plague outbreaks continued to occur up through the early eighteenth century, but even such oft-cited dates as 1679 (for the last plague outbreak in England) and 1722 (for the Continent, following the last major outbreak in Marseille, 1720) may be illusory (Cummins, Kelly, and O� Gráda 2013;Ermus 2014). If, moreover, we add in the Islamicate world, the 1722 end date for the Second Pandemic becomes meaningless.…”