The reduction in infant mortality has been a significant component of mortality decline in all north-western European populations. Infant mortality in Greece has been studied before, though most rates refer to rural populations or short periods of time; while the national ones have been based on multiple assumptions. Only rarely there is available evidence about the evolution of infant mortality in urban Greece in a long-term perspective. This paper, therefore, fills this gap by employing individual-level data, a rare collection of oral histories and qualitative sources from the major urban centre of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, for the period 1860-1940. Infant mortality in Hermoupolis was found to be among the highest in the country for most of the study period. Even though it had been argued that infant mortality in Greece declined in the 1930s, Hermoupolis experienced an earlier decline, situated in the late 1890s. Main factors that were found to be related to this decline include wider access to water, changes in the registration system, fertility decline, improvements in living standards and nutrition among lower strata infants and improvements in maternal literacy. Diarrhoeal diseases killed most infants especially during the hot and dry summer months. Despite the widespread practice of breastfeeding in the city, seasonality analysis indicated the early initiation of supplementary food. This paper contributes to the existing literature by extending our understanding of the factors that facilitated the reduction of urban infant mortality beyond Western Europe and North America.
The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age‐specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city.
This paper employs individual level cause of death data from the port city of Hermoupolis on the Greek island of Syros, in order to test the newly-constructed ICD10h coding system. By constructing cause specific death rates for infants from the late 19th century to early 20th century, the paper contributes to a comparative approach, which aims to show how causes of death differ across several locations within Europe and how they develop over time. Given the scarcity of cause of death data both at the individual and aggregate level in Greece roughly prior to the 1920s, the availability of such data in the draft death registers (for sporadic runs of years in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century) and the civil registration (from 1916 onwards) in Hermoupolis provides a deeper understanding of the history of cause-of-death reporting in the country. Infant mortality in Hermoupolis was relatively high throughout the study period, with water-food borne diseases accounting for the highest number of infant deaths, especially during the hot and dry summer months. While the prominent winter peak of neonatal mortality but also congenital-birth disorders could be partially associated with birth seasonality and/or low temperatures over the winter months. Finally, certain vague terms such as 'atrophy' and 'athrepsy', but especially 'drakos' require further investigation until they are firmly understood.
This paper argues that son preference resulted in gender-based discriminatory practices that unduly increased mortality rates for females at birth and throughout infancy and childhood in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Greece. The relative numbers of boys and girls at birth was extremely high and under-registration of females cannot on its own explain this result. The infanticide and/or mortal neglect of infant girls was therefore more common than previously acknowledged. Likewise, sex ratios increased as children grew older, thus suggesting that parents continued to treat boys and girls differently throughout childhood. A large body of qualitative evidence (contemporary accounts, folklore traditions, feminist newspapers, and anthropological studies) further supports the conclusion that girls were neglected due to their inferior status in society.
Summary The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was the most lethal pandemic in contemporary history. Exceptionally high mortality levels were also found in Hermoupolis during the 1918 pandemic, for which very limited work is available in Greece due to the lack of population statistics. Mortality increased within every age group while the W-shaped curve was confirmed when age-specific mortality is plotted. In particular, young adults and adults experienced the largest excess mortality, while short increases occurred among the very young and elderly due to their pre-existing high mortality risk most likely due to the aftermaths of the 1916–17 naval blockade in parts of the country. Finally, the limited references to the pandemic in the Athenian press—no qualitative sources are available in Hermoupolis—suggest that the Greek government may have attempted to conceal the extent of the pandemic because of the turbulent situation in the country at that time.
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