Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Historical Article
The importance of social intervention in England's mortality decline: the evidence reviewed.
This paper examines the first phase of England's mortality decline, which commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, and proceeded fitfully down to the end of the nineteenth. It finds that recent research in population history has weakened the explanation known as the McKeown thesis, but that the alternative synthesis, developed by Szreter, does not stand up well to a scrutiny of the evidence on infant mortality and morbidity. ⋯ C. Riley for the second half of the nineteenth century.