The Health of the Middle Class: The St. Thomas' Anglican Church Cemetery Project

Skeletal health in the Western Hemisphere from 4000 B.C. to the present

“…Moreover, repetitive patterns of hard work associated with EuroAmerican agriculture in the nineteenth century may have been a significant source of degenerative joint disease. 46 The African-American samples show some interesting similarities and differences. The sample of those who were free displayed high rates of hypoplasias and infections, but childhood health was relatively good.…”

“…Socio-economic conditions were remarkably different at the poorhouse in Rochester, New York, and among the middle-class Episcopalians of Belleville, Ontario, during the mid-nineteenth century. 46,47 Yet the poorhouse skeletons had fewer lesions or signs of biological stress. The most plausible explanation is that conditions were so bad at the poorhouse that most individuals died quickly, before lesions could accumulate.…”

A synthetic measure of mortality using skeletal data from ancient cemeteries: The d index

“…For example, in the necropolises analyzed here, with very few exceptions, skeletons of individuals under the age of 5 constitute only 10%-20% of the total, while in the C&D standard table the percentages for those with an average age at death of 20 years, 30 years, and 40 years are 50%, 40%, and 25% respectively. This lack of children could be because they were buried separately from the adults, as demonstrated by several cemeteries found in different Italian regions and dated to different chronological periods where only children were buried (see Barbiera and Dalla-Zuanna 2007 for a discussion), or because the fragility of their bones resulted in their loss from the archeological record (Saunders et al 2002). Employing the d ratio, as explained above, minimizes this shortcoming in the data.…”

Dental health of elderly confederate veterans: Evidence from the Texas State Cemetery

“…Again, this difference is probably related to the age-cumulative nature of both caries and AMTL (cf. Saunders et al, 2002), i.e., the Confederate veterans had fewer teeth per mouth, and were more likely to have caries Winchell et al, 1995. 7 Lanphear, 1988.…”

“…This difference may be related to the fact that modern elderly people have a higher number of teeth per mouth than the Confederate veterans (described later in text), as well as modern populations' increasing intake of sugar and highly processed foods (cf. Saunders et al, 2002). However, some of the factors resulting in high dental caries in modern samples were probably also issues for Confederate veterans.…”