Insects and the European Mortality Decline

Abstract

CRUDE DEATH RATES IN EUROPE BEGAN TO FALL AFTER 1670, with variations from place to place in the beginning date of this decline. By the mid-twentieth century, death rates had declined from between 30 and 40 per 1000 each year to around 10 per 1000.1 The decline, one of the most important features of European experience in the modern era, occurred in two phases. The two are separated by a mortality plateau, which characterized much of Europe during rapid urban growth in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Growing cities, known historically as sites of excessive fatalities, interrupted the decline until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when public health reforms and an improved standard of living reestablished it. Each phase of the mortality decline presents its own problems of explanation and interpretation. The first accounts for approximately half the overall decline in death rates. By the 1820s, when urban growth intervened, crude death rates in western Europe had fallen in many areas to around 20 per 1000 per annum. This