Causes of short stature among coal‐mining children, 1823–1850 1

Historians and biologists increasingly accept that studies of the welfare ilof historical populations require a consideration of physical development. Variation in human height is now regarded as a major indicator of the nutritional status of historical populations; moreover, records of historical heights remain among the most abundant surviving anthropometric evidence. Floud, Wachter, and Gregory examined the historical relationship between nutrition and height and produced important findings based on the records of military recruits.2 Their research identified changes in the heights of a large sample of the British population over the last two centuries and sought to ascribe these changes to variations in nutritional status (conventionally defined as gross nutritional intake minus deleterious environmental and genetic influences). The work of Floud et al. indicated a secular increase in the heights of British people over the last two centuries. However, they identified a temporary decline in the average stature of those born in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. They further suggested that this decline resulted largely from poor nutritional status. Modern studies of the nutritionally deprived in economically underdeveloped regions largely support these findings, and have firmly established a relationship between short stature and poor nutritional status. Analysis of historical heights clearly vies with orthodox scrutiny of real incomes as a method of measuring the welfare history of British workingclass populations. Floud et al. have drawn an important distinction between evidence of wages and records of heights for the period from i825 to i850. In their view, 'even if there were substantial gains in real incomes or in real wages for the working class in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, these were more than outweighed by other features of the environment-urbanisation, disease, diet and possibly work intensity.'3 These studies have gone so far as to suggest that conventional economic indices have 'misled scholars concerned with the impact of industrialization and economic development on the British people'.4