title: Health Problems of Pre-industrial Societies
abstract: In the pre-industrial period, mortality trends in Europe were characterized by frequent mortality crises, often in connection with war, famine and/or epidemics. This chapter reviews long-term trends in wars and war-related deaths, in homicide, and in the occurrence of famines, and then looks at secular trends in four diseases that often caused massive epidemics: plague, smallpox, typhus and malaria. The rise of these health problems, often in the distant past, is traced, as well as their ultimat