Like mother, like child : investigating perinatal and maternal health stress in post-medieval London.

Post-Medieval London (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries) was a stressful environment for the poor. Overcrowded and squalid housing, physically demanding and risky working conditions, air and water pollution, inadequate diet and exposure to infectious diseases created high levels of morbidity and low life expectancy. All of these factors pressed with particular severity on the lowest members of the social strata, with burgeoning disparities in health between the richest and poorest. Foetal, perinatal and infant skeletal remains provide the most sensitive source of bioarchaeological information regarding past population health and in particular maternal well-being. This chapter examined the evidence for chronic growth and health disruption in 136 foetal, perinatal and infant skeletons from four low-status cemetery samples in post-medieval London. The aim of this study was to consider the impact of poverty on the maternal-infant nexus, through an analysis of evidence of growth disruption and pathological lesions. The results highlight the dire consequences of poverty in London during this period from the very earliest moments of life

Body Structure and Physical Self-Concept in Early Adolescence

In adolescence, the complexity of human ontogenesis embraces biological growth and maturation as well as mental, affective, and cognitive progress, and adaptation to the requirements of society. To accept our morphological constellation as part of our gender may prove a problem even to a child of average rate of maturation. The main purposes of the present study were to compare selected body shape factors of early adolescents belonging to different physical self-concept subgroups, and to identify those somatic factors that have the strongest influence on the physical self-concept. A randomly selected subsample of the 2nd Hungarian National Growth Study formed the sample of the analysis. Besides the anthropometric investigations, the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale was administered to altogether 2,140 adolescents (aged 11-14). The multinominal logistic regression was used to reveal the relationship between absolute body dimensions, relative body dimensions, nutritional status, body mass components, body shape, and physical self-concept. The better the physical self-concept, the less the fatness was found in both sexes. In early adolescents, having negative physical self-concept endomorphy was significantly larger than in their age-peers with good self-concept. The presumed fact that obesity is not popular in adolescence has been confirmed by this study. However, the underweight nutritional status was attractive in the girls. These results informed us about the considerable influence of the pubertal-not-normal nutritional status on the discrepancy between the ideal and actual self-concepts. </jats:p

Like Mother, Like Child: Investigating Perinatal and Maternal Health Stress in Post-Medieval London

Post-Medieval London (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries) was a stressful environment for the poor. Overcrowded and squalid housing, physically demanding and risky working conditions, air and water pollution, inadequate diet and exposure to infectious diseases created high levels of morbidity and low life expectancy. All of these factors pressed with particular severity on the lowest members of the social strata, with burgeoning disparities in health between the richest and poorest. Foetal, perinatal and infant skeletal remains provide the most sensitive source of bioarchaeological information regarding past population health and in particular maternal well-being. This chapter examined the evidence for chronic growth and health disruption in 136 foetal, perinatal and infant skeletons from four low-status cemetery samples in post-medieval London. The aim of this study was to consider the impact of poverty on the maternal-infant nexus, through an analysis of evidence of growth disruption and pathological lesions. The results highlight the dire consequences of poverty in London during this period from the very earliest moments of life