Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Body Size and Mortality in Post-Medieval England

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project answers questions regarding the relationship between body size and mortality. How does body size influence mortality? Does the relationship between body size and mortality depend on social status or a history of illness? These questions are of critical importance in the field of public health today. This study will potentially be of interest to anthropologists, epidemiologists, medical professionals, and historians of post-medieval Europe alike. It will also advance the training of a female graduate student in science. Short stature and body mass at both extremes of the distribution have consistently been linked to poor health outcomes in modern humans, but the nature of the relationship between body size and mortality is poorly understood. Focusing on skeletal collections from London's upper, middle, and lower social strata during the 17th-19th centuries, this project explores the relationship between skeletally estimated body size (stature and mass) and mortality, and how that relationship varies with socioeconomic status and evidence of ill-health. Skeletal age at death is estimated via transition analysis, and body size is reconstructed using regression formulae developed to estimate stature and body mass based on skeletal measurements. Starting with a Gompertz-Makeham model as baseline mortality, the Usher multistate model of health and mortality is used to determine if particular body types result in increased risk of death. Socioeconomic status and evidence of morbidity are modeled as covariates in order to determine whether the influence of body size on mortality is direct (independent of other stressors), indirect (synergistic with other stressors), or coincidental. The frequency of high-risk body types is compared between the cemeteries to test for differential distribution of risk among social strata.