Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: Geographic pathways of contagion

Abstract

In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gender penalty differs among the three communities. Models are improved when differentiated by cause of death. Locating households using a GIS reveals high levels of residential segregation by ethnicity and income, spatial correlation of environmental hazards, and constraints on exit from zones of risk, which together produce neighbourhood effects as large as household effects. Attention to groups excluded (foundlings and inmates of institutions) confirms that models limited to full household-level information significantly underestimate the impacts of poverty and exclusion.

Socioeconomic and cultural differentials in mortality in a late 19th century urban setting: A linked records study from Tartu, Estonia, 1897-1900

“…Out of 1,773 deaths recorded during the observation period, 73.5% were successfully linked to the corresponding census record. The linkage rate is similar to that reported in many linked-records studies of the period (Edvinsson 1995;Hautaniemi, Anderton, and Swedlund 2000;Thornton and Olson 2011). The length of time between the census and the death of an individual seems to have slightly reduced the chances of a secure match.…”

“…To account for this we used water supply, type of privy, and the presence of carters as controls. The two former measures were found to be significant in an earlier study on the impact of sanitation on infant mortality in the same setting (Jaadla and Puur 2016) and the effect of horses in near proximity to the residence has been demonstrated in other contexts (Morgan 2002;Thornton and Olson 2011). Previous research has also indicated the importance of individuals' geographical mobility to their subsequent chances of survival (Hautaniemi, Swedlund, and Anderton 1999;Kesztenbaum and Rosenthal 2011).…”

“…The calculation of age-specific deaths rates was based on the deaths recorded in parish registers during the two years surrounding the census (1896 and 1897) and the Lutheran population enumerated at the census. Because children under one year of age are often under-enumerated in historical censuses, the number of live births registered during the year preceding the census was used for the estimation of infant mortality (Thornton and Olson 2011). The estimation employed the MORTPAK software package (United Nations Population Division 2013), which means that the results are not affected by incomplete linkage of death records to the census.…”

Enfant normal et enfance normalisée

“…L'interpellation est directe : elle ne concerne pas que les seules autorités publiques. Rappelons pour mémoire que la mortalité infantile (désormais MI) faisait dans une ville comme Montréal des ravages avec des taux effarants largement au-dessus de ce qu'on peut observer dans des villes comparables : autour de 300 % à Montréal et plus de 400 % dans certains quartiers de Québec (Gagné, 2004 ;Thornton et Olson, 2011). La lutte contre la MI est élevée au rang de cause nationale « sacrée » entraînant la plus grande mobilisation.…”

The geography of early childhood mortality in England and Wales, 1881–1911

“…This includes pioneering work by the Princeton European Fertility project (Coale and Watkins 1986) and more recent studies taking spatial econometric approaches to investigate the spread of fertility decline (BocquetAppel and Jakobi 1998; Haines and Hacker 2011;González-Bailón and Murphy 2013;Goldstein and Klüsener 2014;Klüsener, Dribe, and Scalone 2016). However, the spatial analysis of historical mortality has thus far mainly focussed on infant mortality and described subnational mortality patterns (Ramiro-Fariñas and Sanz-Gimeno 2000; Edvinsson, Brändström, and Rogers 2001;Thorvaldsen 2002;van den Boomen 2015) or focussed on specific urban environments (Thornton and Olson 2011;Reid, Garrett, and Szreter 2016;Connor 2017). A more limited amount of cross-country analysis has also concentrated on infant mortality (Edvinsson, Garðarsdóttir, and Thorvaldsen 2008;Klüsener et al 2014).…”