Original scientific paper
Health maps of a historical population in nineteenth-century Friuli (Northeastern Italy)
Alessio Fornasin
; Dipartimento di Scienze economiche e statistiche – Università di Udine, Udine, Italia
Marco Breschi
; Dipartimento di Scienze economiche e aziendali – Università di Sassari, Udine, Italia
Matteo Manfredini
; Dipartimento di Bioscienze – Università di Parma, Parma, Italia
Abstract
This paper aims at presenting some health maps of a historical population. The studies on the health status of past populations are usually focused on the causes of death. Our purpose is to present some descriptive analyses on non-deadly diseases. The present work focuses on the province of Friuli (north-eastern Italy) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The used sources are military call-up records. We collected about 300,000 records relative to military recruitment that took place between 1866 and 1909 (birth cohorts 1846-1890). Our main concern was the health status of the 20-year male population, and its association with environmental, socio economic and genetic factors. Generally speaking, we observe that the northern mountain area was the most advantaged, while young adults from the eastern and western parts of the province were the most disadvantaged. A lot of factors and causes contributed to determine the spatial distribution of specific diseases in Friuli, whilst others remain unknown because
simple descriptive analyses are not sufficient to highlight them all. In particular, the distribution of the thyroidal hypertrophy was almost certainly due to the water quality, while the distribution of dental caries was probably related to genetic and dietary factors.
Keywords
Health maps; Military sources; Friuli (Italy); 19th century
Hrčak ID:
184011
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2017.
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