Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:20:49.286Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Potential of Auxological Data for Monitoring Economic and Social Well-Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

J. M. Tanner
J. M. Tanner*
Affiliation:
University of London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Auxology, the study of physical growth (from auxein, to increase), has long been pressed into service as a measure of human welfare. In the sixteenth century Levinus Lemnius, doctor and later priest in the Low Countries, castigated “schoolmasters and others that take upon them to teach and boord young boyes (and) pinch their poore Pupils and Boorders by the belly, and allow them meate neither sufficient nor yet wholesome.” “Whereby it cometh to passe,” he continued,

That in growth they seldome come to any personable stature, to the use of their full powers, to perfect strength and firmity of their members, or to any handsome feature or composition of bodily proportion: and the cause is for that in their tender and growing age, being kept under by famine and skanted of common meate and drinke, their natural moisture which requireth continuall cherishing and maintenance, was skanted and bebarred of his due nourishment and competent allowance [English translation of 1633, The Touchstone of Complexions, original 1561; see Tanner, 1981: 25].

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , Fall 1982 , pp. 571 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1982 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bielicki, T., Szczotka, H., and Charzewski, J. (1981) “The influence of three socio-economic factors on body height in Polish military conscripts.” Human Biology 53: 543–556.Google Scholar
Brundtland, G. H., Liestøl, K., and Walløe, L. (1980) “Height, weight and menarcheal age of Oslo schoolchildren during the last 60 years.” Annals of Human Biology 7: 307–322.Google Scholar
Clements, E.M.B. and Pickett, K.G. (1957) “Stature and weight of men from England and Wales in 1941.” British J. of Preventive and Social Medicine 11: 51–60.Google Scholar
Cliquet, R. L. (1968) “Social mobility and the anthropological structure of populations.” Human Bioloev 40: 17–43.Google Scholar
Goldstein, H. (1971) “Factors influencing the height of seven-year-old children—results from the National Child Development Study.” Human Biology 43: 92–111.Google Scholar
Liestøl, K. (1982) “Social conditions and menarcheal age: the importance of early years of life.” Annals of Human Biology 9.Google Scholar
Lindgren, G. (1976) “Height, weight and menarche in Swedish urban school children in relation to socio-economic and regional factors.” Annals of Human Biology 3: 501–528.Google Scholar
Martorell, R. (1980) “Interrelationships between diet, infectious disease and nutritional status,” pp. 81–106 in Greene, L. S. and Johnston, F. E. (eds.) Social and Biological Predictors of Nutritional Status, Physical Growth and Neurological Development. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Preece, M. A. and Baines, M. J. (1978) “A new family of mathematical models describing the human growth curve.” Annals of Human Biology 5: 1–24.Google Scholar
Schreider, E. (1967) “Possible selective mechanism of social differentiation in biological traits.” Human Biology 39: 14–20.Google Scholar
Schreider, E. (1964) “Recherches sur la stratification sociale des caractères biologiques.” Bio typologie 25: 105–135.Google Scholar
Steckel, R. H. (1979) “Slave height profiles from coastwise manifests.” Explorations in Economic History 16: 363–380.Google Scholar
Stein, Z., Susser, M., Saenger, G., and Marolla, F. (1975) Famine and Human Development: The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–45. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, J. M. (1981) A History of the Study of Human Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, J. M. (1978) Foetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity. London: Open Books, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, J. M. (1963) “Regulation of growth in size of mammals.” Nature 199: 845–850.Google Scholar
Tanner, J. M., Hayashi, T., Preece, M. A., and Cameron, N. (1982) “Increase in length of leg relative to trunk in Japanese children and adults from 1957 to 1977; and comparison with British and with Japanese-Americans.” Annals of Human Biology 9.Google Scholar
Thomson, A. M. (1959) “Maternal stature and reproductive efficiency.” Eugenics Rev. 51: 157–162.Google Scholar