Abstract
Between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War there was a ‘health transition’ in European countries, including those that were then outposts of the British Empire. White Australia and New Zealand shared in this population revolution. Internationally, there were marked transitions in fertility and mortality, and their perceived causes.1 Indigenous populations, then thought to be dying out because they had been ravaged by European-introduced diseases, did not experience similar transitions in fertility and mortality rates until the second half of the twentieth century. According to the philosophy of the day, it was the white ‘race’ that mattered; to be of British stock was to be superior. Among those who had migrated from the ‘Old World’ and their children, life-chances were transformed. The same changes were happening simultaneously in the ‘Old World’ and in recently colonised countries: in France and the United States, whose fertility declines began early; in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Birth rates declined dramatically and so did infant mortality rates.2 Parents had fewer children, on average, by the twentieth century, but they could confidently expect to see their offspring grow up and that those children would survive into a healthy old age.
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Notes
The Health Transition Workshop, ‘Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health: What is the Evidence?’, Canberra, May 1989, discussed this issue.
The papers were published as John Caldwell, Sally Findley, Pat Caldwell, Gigi Santow, Wendy Cosford, Jennifer Braid and Daphne Broers-Freeman (eds), What We Know About Health Transition: The Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health, Health Transition Series no. 2, vols. 1 & 2, Canberra, 1990.
see, for example, Lado T. Ruzicka and John C. Caldwell, The End of Demographic Transition in Australia, Canberra, 1977;
Pat Quiggin, No Rising Generation, Canberra, 1988;
Ann Larson, Growing Up in Melbourne: Family Life in the Late Nineteenth Century, Canberra, 1994
John C. Caldwell, ‘Introductory Thoughts on Health Transition’, in J.C. Caldwell et al. (eds), What We Know About Health Transition, vol. 1, pp. xi–xiii.
John C. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline, London, 1982.
Francine van de Walle, ‘Infant Mortality and the European Demographic Transition’, in Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (eds), The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Princeton, 1986, pp. 211–15 (quotation from p. 211).
Trends in European infant mortality rates are outlined in R. Woods, P. Watterson and J. Woodward, ‘The Causes of Rapid Infant Mortality Decline in England and Wales, 1861–1921. Part 1’, Population Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, November 1988, pp. 348–50.
W.P.D. Logan, ‘Mortality in England and Wales from 1848 to 1947’, Population Studies, vol. 4, 1950–1, p. 135
and H.O. Lancaster, ‘Infant Mortality in Australia’, MJA, 21 July 1956, p. 101, observed that infant mortality rates in England and Australia respectively halved about every 25 years
John Powles gives a similar description of the underlying trend, in ‘Keeping the Doctor Away’, in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds), Making a Life: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 74–5.
Douglas Gordon, Health, Sickness, and Society, Brisbane, 1976, p. 188.
also Naomi Williams and Graham Mooney, ‘Infant Mortality in an “Age of Great Cities”: London and the English Provincial Cities Compared, c.1840–1910’, Continuity and Change, vol. 9, no. 2, 1994, pp. 185–212.
Lado Ruzicka and Penny Kane, ‘Health Transition: The Course of Morbidity and Mortality’, in Caldwell et al. (eds), What We Know About Health Transition, vol. 1, p. 1.
The original source is Omran, ‘The Epidemiologic Transition: A Theory of the Epidemiology of Population Change’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, 1971
J.H.L. Cumpston and F. McCallum, The History of the Intestinal Infections (and Typhus Fever) in Australia 1788–1923, Melbourne, 1927, pp. 390–1.
Cumpston’s view of infant mortality trends is summarised in J.H.L. Cumpston (introduced and edited by M.J. Lewis), Health and Disease in Australia. A History, Canberra, 1989, ch. 7.
Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Sydney, 1987, p. 57.
Review of P.E. Muskett, The Feeding and Management of Australian Infants in Health and Disease, 5th edn, in AMG, 21 May 1900, p. 215; P.E. Muskett, An Australian Appeal, cited in ‘Infantile Mortality in Tasmania’, AMG, 20 April 1907, p. 205.
F.B. Smith, ‘Health’, in John Benson (ed.), The Working Class in England 1875–1914, London, 1985, p. 38.
Michael Durey, ‘Infant Mortality in Perth, Western Australia, 1870–1914: A Preliminary Analysis’, Studies in Western Australian History, no. 5, December 1982, pp. 62–71.
on topography and social class, see Peter Spearritt, Sydney Since the Twenties, Sydney, 1978
Philippa Mein Smith and Lionel Frost, ‘Suburbia and Infant Death in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Adelaide’, Urban History, vol. 21, pt 2, October 1994, pp. 251–71 and errata, vol. 22, pt 1, May 1995, pp. 167–8.
Michael R. Haines, ‘Socio-economic Differentials in Infant and Child Mortality during Mortality Decline: England and Wales, 1890–1911’, Population Studies, vol. 49, 1995, pp. 297–315.
Ann Larson, ‘Socio-Economic Differentials in Child Mortality in Third World Cities: Lessons from the Past’, paper, Fourth National Conference of the Australian Population Association, Brisbane, August–September 1988.
On similar patterns in Britain and the United States, see P.A. Watterson, ‘Infant Mortality by Father’s Occupation from the 1911 Census of England and Wales’, Demography, vol. 25, no. 2, May 1988, pp. 289–306;
Douglas C. Ewbank and Samuel H. Preston, ‘Personal Health Behaviour and the Decline in Infant and Child Mortality: The United States, 1900–1930’, in Caldwell et al. (eds), What We Know About Health Transition, vol. 1, ch. 7.
See, for example, John C. Caldwell, ‘Routes to Low Mortality in Poor Countries’, Population and Development Review, vol. 12, no. 2, June 1986, pp. 171–220
also in John C. Caldwell and Gigi Santow (eds), Selected Readings in the Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health, Health Transition Series no 1, Canberra, 1989, ch. 1
On recent arguments about the role of education for women, see Health Transition Review, vol. 3, no. 2, October 1993 and vol. 4, no. 2, October 1994.
For an analysis of the actual experience of women and home ownership, see Philippa Mein Smith and Lionel Frost, ‘Home Ownership in Adelaide, 1881–1911’, AEHR, March 1995, pp. 40–56
F.B. Smith, The People’s Health, Canberra, 1979, p. 122;
see also R. Reves, ‘Declining Fertility in England and Wales as a Major Cause of the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality’, American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 22, no. 1, 1985, pp. 112–26
W.J. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown, Christchurch, 1979;
Alison Mackinnon, ‘The State as an Agent of Demographic Change? The Higher Education of Women and Fertility Decline, 1880–1930’, Journal of Aust. Studies, vol. 37, 1993, p. 58.
and Patricia Grimshaw and Charles Fahey, ‘Family and Community in Nineteenth-century Castlemaine’, in P. Grimshaw, C. McConville and E. McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, Sydney, 1985, chs. 9 and 16
The important secondary source is N. Hicks, ‘This Sin and Scandal’: Australia’s Population Debate 1891–1911, Canberra, 1978.
Methods are summarised in P. Mein Smith, ‘Contraception’, in Graeme Aplin, S.G. Foster and Michael McKernan (eds), Australians: A Historical Dictionary, Sydney, 1987, p. 91;
Gigi Santow, ‘Coitus Interruptus in the Twentieth Century’, Population and Development Review, vol. 19, no. 4, December 1993, pp. 768, 772, 783.
Judith Allen, ‘Octavius Beale Re-considered: Infanticide, Babyfarming and Abortion in NSW 1880–1939’, in Sydney Labour History Group, What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History, Sydney, 1982, pp. 127–8.
The crucial source on respectability is Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond 1900–1965, Melbourne, 1984.
Smith, The People’s Health, p. 122, in Benson, (ed.), The Working Class in England, p. 56, and The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950, Beckenham, Kent, 1988, pp. 8–9;
Bryan Gandevia also suggested a relation between fewer children, more time and money to feed them, in Tears Often Shed, Sydney, 1978, p. 93
See V. Zelizer Pricing the Priceless Child, New York, 1985.
on England, Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918, New York, 1993
Anna P. Stout, ‘The New Woman’, in Hocken Library, Women and the Vote, Dunedin, 1986, pp. 16–20.
Jessie Ackermann, Australia from a Woman’s Point of View, Sydney, 1981 (1st pub 1913), ch. xxi.
Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920, Ithaca and London, 1993;
F.S. Hone, ‘Infantile Mortality’, AMG, 13 July 1912, p. 25.
See, for example, Milton J. Lewis, ‘“Populate or Perish”: Aspects of Infant and Maternal Health in Sydney, 1870–1939’, PhD thesis, ANU, 1976, p. 166.
W. McLean, ‘The Declining Birth-Rate in Australia’, IMJA, 20 March 1904, p. 125.
For the contemporary debate about the association between birth and infant death rates, see Hone, ‘Infantile Mortality’, AMG, 13 July 1912, p. 28;
W. McLean, ‘The Declining Birth-Rate in Australia’, IMJA, 20 March 1904, pp. 109-26, ‘A Rejoinder’, 20 June 1904, pp. 311–16;
John B. Trivett, ‘The Decline of the Birth-Rate in New South Wales’, IMJA, 20 May 1904, pp. 238–48.
R. Arthur, ‘Increase of Population Through a Diminished Death-Rate’, AMG, 25 January 1901, p. 43
Judith Allen, Sex & Secrets, Melbourne, 1990, p. 67.
See, for example, S. Sheridan, in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation, Sydney, 1993.
Stephen Garton, ‘Sound Minds and Healthy Bodies: Re-considering Eugenics in Australia, 1914–1940’, AHS, vol. 26, no. 103, October 1994, pp. 163–81.
Stephen Garton, ‘Sir Charles Mackellar: Psychiatry, Eugenics and Child Welfare in New South Wales, 1900–1914’, HS, vol. 22, no. 86, April 1986, pp. 21–34.
W. Perrin Norris, Chairman of the Victorian Board of Public Health, Infant Life Protection, 1907, p. 5 [my emphasis]; A. Jeffreys Wood concurred that the illegitimate deserved a ‘fair chance’, ‘Preservation of Infant Life’, IMJA, 20 March 1908, p. 141.
L. Emmett Holt, ‘Infant Mortality, Ancient and Modern. An Historical Sketch’, Archives of Pediatrics, December 1913, p. 886.
‘The Protection of Children’, AMG, 21 June 1909, p. 321.
Hicks’ focus was on Divisions B and E of the Report, not C, on infant mortality, N. Hicks, ‘Evidence and Contemporary Opinion About the Peopling of Australia, 1890–1911’, PhD thesis, ANU, 1971, p. 119.
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© 1997 Philippa Mein Smith
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Smith, P.M. (1997). A White Health Transition. In: Mothers and King Baby. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14304-7_2
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