The Pursuit of Power by Richard J. Evans

Author:Richard J. Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-10T13:15:26+00:00

OUT OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

Epidemics might hit the headlines, but the real killers were the everyday ones: poor nutrition, lack of hygiene, chronic conditions of one kind and another. At Europe’s extremes these could have a devastating effect. In remote, treeless Danish-administered Iceland, the harshness of the northern climate, just south of the Arctic Circle, was mitigated by the mildness of the North Atlantic Drift, bringing warmer water up the Atlantic from the Gulf Stream. But the long dark winters made for a short growing season – only four to five months – and nothing much more could be grown than grass to feed livestock. Three-quarters of the island was covered in barren lava fields, glaciers, mountains and deserts, and human habitation clung to the margins, near the sea. Centuries of over-grazing had eroded the grasslands and reduced the livestock, which numbered around 300,000 sheep and 25,000 cattle at mid-century. Volcanic eruptions and epidemics, cold winters and famines had brought the population from its medieval maximum of around 100,000 down to little more than half that number by the early nineteenth century. When ice floes appeared in strength off the coast, the temperature on the coastal plains plummeted and the grass failed to grow.

In the nineteenth century, Icelanders lived mainly off mutton, beef and fish; scurvy was common, and standards of cleanliness were so low that visitors frequently commented on what the intrepid Austrian explorer Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858) called in 1852 the ‘unparalleled filthiness’ of the turf-roofed, smoke-filled farmhouses. She found the floor of one house ‘actually slippery from the incessant expectorations’. Malnutrition had lowered the average height of Icelandic men (measured by skeletal remains) from 5 feet 8 inches in the Middle Ages to 5 feet 6 inches by 1800. The crude death rate stood at just under 30 per 1,000 population up to the 1870s – more than twice that of the city of Hamburg in 1892, the year of the great cholera epidemic. Much of the mortality was among infants. In the 1840s infant mortality in Iceland ran at an annual average of 35 per cent, more than twice that of Norway and Sweden. Life expectancy at birth in the 1850s was only thirty-two. Birth rates were correspondingly high, at nearly 40 births per 1,000 population from the 1830s to the 1850s. Iceland was by no means an extreme case in its demographic misery. In Spain the death rate remained stubbornly at around 30 per 1,000 until 1900, not least because of the failure to carry out vaccinations against smallpox in the rural interior of the country, despite their general availability since 1798. The situation was made worse by an increase in the number of children sent to foundling hospitals during the first half of the century, where 58 per cent of them died before reaching the age of five. Rural poverty could be deadly. In the 1880s infant mortality rates were regularly around 20 to 30 per cent per annum in the sharecropping district of Bertalia, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

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