The medical writer, Thomas McKeown, can justifiably claim to have been one of the most influential figures in the develop ment of the social history of medicine during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Between 1955 and his death in 1988, he p ublished a stream of articles and books in which he outlined his ideas about the reasons for the decline of mortality and the

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New Labour has encouraged the development of a 'partnership' between the statutory and voluntary sectors in which both sides are expected to work together to improve welfare provision. However, if the voluntary sector has always sought a partnership with the state, it is important to ask how this partnership has changed over time and may change in the future. This paper examines the relationship between the two sectors over the last two centuries. It begins by discussing the role played by the voluntary sector and the history of statutory–voluntary relations during the 19th century. It then examines the development of the 'new philanthropy' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before considering the voluntary sector's response to the expansion of state welfare provision after 1945. The final section summarises the paper's main arguments and compares Labour and Conservative attitudes to the role of voluntary social provision before the 2010 General Election

In recent years, a number of historians have examined the reasons for differences in the height and health of men and women in nineteenth-century Britain, often drawing on economic studies which link excess female mortality in the developing world to restrictions in women's employment opportunities. This paper re-examines this literature and summarises the existing literature on sex-specific differences in height, weight and mortality in England and Wales before 1850. It then uses two electronic datasets to examine changes in cause-specific mortality rates between 1851 and 1995. Although there is little evidence to support the view that the systematic neglect of female children was responsible for high rates of female mortality in childhood, there is rather more evidence to show that gender inequalities contributed to excess female mortality in adulthood

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