Inequalities in early life mortality

This dissertation examines mortality inequalities in infancy, childhood and adolescence before and during the mortality decline of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on three measurable factors that each played a role in shaping people’s health: sex and gender, social class and geographical place. Sex and gender refer to both the physiological differences between men and women, which at different stages in their lives have increased or decreased their health (sex), and the socially constructed gender, which in Denmark and Europe in the nineteenth century shaped the lives of individuals in many ways that could affect their mortality. Social class determined the economic resources available to a family, and thereby their level of nutrition, housing standards and the amount of time they could spare for childcare. Geographical place affected individuals through the natural and social environment that was exposed to them daily which, especially for infants, could impact their health significantly. The dissertation consists of three distinct case studies, each focusing on one of the above factors, though there are several overlaps between them. The first, which focuses on gender-specific differences in mortality, concludes that the female population, from late childhood and until late adolescence, had a significantly higher mortality than males, and considers how gender discrimination may have contributed to this pattern. The second, which follows a cohort of children in Copenhagen in the late 1880s, shows that children from working-class families had an up to 30 percent higher risk of dying than those from middle and upper classes, and that the disparity was greatest among girls. In the third case study, which examines infant mortality at the parish level from 1835 to 1915, I delineate areas with relatively high or low mortality and examine its seasonal distribution and development over time. The analysis points to quite divergent patterns between high mortality clusters, suggesting that the reasons for their high mortality likely varied as well. Overall, the dissertation illustrates that health inequality is not just a modern phenomenon. There were already significant inequalities in the average lifespan of the Danish population in the nineteenth century.