Human demography and disease

"Human Demography and Disease offers an interdisciplinary and integrated perspective on the relationship between historical populations and the dynamics of epidemiological processes. It brings the techniques of time-series analysis and computer matrix modelling to historical demography and geography to extract detailed information concerning the oscillations in births, deaths, migrations and epidemics from parish register and other data series and to build mathematical models of the population cycles. This book presents a new way of studying pre-industrial communities and explores the subtle, and hitherto undetected effects of fluctuating nutritional levels on mortality patterns and the dynamics of infectious diseases. This piece of detective work will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students in the fields of demography, anthropology, historical geography, social history, population biology, public health and epidemiology."--Jacket.

Conversion table for imperial to metric units -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Tools for demography and epidemiology -- 3. Identification of population oscillations: a case study -- 4. Density-dependent control and feedback -- 5. Modelling the endogenous oscillations and predictions from time-series analysis -- 6. Cycles in the grain price series -- 7. Interactions of exogenous cycles: a case study -- 8. Mortality crises and the effects of the price of wool -- 9. Modelling epidemics for the demographer: the dynamics of smallpox in London -- 10. Non-linear modelling of the 2-yearly epidemics of smallpox: the genesis of chaos? -- 11. Measles and whooping cough in London -- 12. Integration of the dynamics of infectious diseases with the demography of London -- 13. Smallpox in rural towns in England in the 17th and 18th centuries -- 14. Infectious diseases in England and Wales in the 19th century -- 15. Prospectives -- towards a metapopulation study.