Smallpox and Nutritional Status in England, 1770‐1873: On the Difficulties of Estimating Historical Heights

In a recent i ssue of this journal, Voth and Leunig (V&L) analysed the impact of smallpox on ph ysical stature in the e ighteenth and n ineteenth centuries and d rew far-reaching conclusions about t he c orrelation b etween the incidence of smallpox and the development of human stature in England.*2 Using a sample of lower-class boys recruited into the Marine Society,*3 they estimated that t he disease had a strong negative impact of about 1 inch on height. We a rgue below that their methodology is inappropriate and that their results are flawed for at least three reasons. (1) The Marine Society was a c haritable institution that t ook poor boys from the streets of London and educated them as s ervants and apprentices for the navy. However, the admission of the boys was controlled by minimum height requirements, which changed frequently over time, and increased substantially after the Napoleonic wars. In practice they were enforced with varying degrees of stringency. Hence, some observations below the height standard are also included in the sample, a phenomenon called shortfall.*4 Due to these sampling biases the first and p robably most i mportant analytical step is a visual i nspection o f the height distribution which in ou r case reveals sample deficiencies s uch as s hortfall, right-hand truncation, and o ther deviations from normality.*5 Here we applied a continuous