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Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866 to 1965
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2021
Abstract
Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.
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- © The Economic History Association 2021
Footnotes
We thank Vellore Arthi, Alan Barreca, Brian Beach, Robert Margo, Andrew Oswald, the Editor, William Collins, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the European Economic Association Meeting, the Copenhagen Business School Inequality Platform’s First Workshop on Climate Change and Inequality, and the 5th Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for Economic and Social History for their helpful comments. Funding for this project was provided by National Science Foundation CAREER Grant No. 1552692.
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