Anthropometric History of Brazil, 1850–1950: Insights from Military and Passport Records

Daniel Franken*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    8 Citations (Scopus)
    110 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    f historical evidence. Although quantitative scholars have revealed the efficacy of the First Republic (1889–1930) in fomenting economic progress, the
    extent to which Brazil’s early economic growth fostered improvements in
    health remains unclear. This paper fills this void in scholarship by relying
    on hitherto untapped archival sources with data on human stature—a reliable metric for health and nutritional status. My analysis centres heavily
    on a large (n ≈ 16,000), geographically-comprehensive series compiled
    from military inscription files, supplemented by an ancillary dataset
    drawn from passport records (n ≈ 6,000). I document inferior heights in
    the North and Northeast that predated the advent of industrialisation. At
    the national level, my findings reveal an increase in stature of over 2.5 cm
    between soldiers born in the 1880s and those born in the 1910s. In the
    South and Southeast, I argue that increased real income and public-health
    interventions explain the earlier upward trend in heights, while rural sanitary reforms were most important in the North and Northeast, where
    heights remained stagnant until the 1910 decade and diseases such as hookworm and malaria were most rampant
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)377-408
    Number of pages32
    JournalJournal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History
    Volume37
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Sept-2019

    Keywords

    • UNITED-STATES
    • HEIGHT

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