Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T21:48:32.571Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tall Tales: Anthropometric Measures of Weil-Being in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1821-1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Steven L. Hoch
Steven L. Hoch*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Iowa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“From the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, Paul Bunyan split the atmosphere exacdy 12 feet 11 inches. His weight, he told me—and I don't doubt his word for a moment—was 888 pounds.” Together with precise measures of Paul Bunyan's hips, waist, shoulders, thighs, calves, and reach, subsequently detailed, we would, it seems, have a rather comprehensive anthropometric description of this legendary logger. But his companion, Babe the Blue Ox, “was seven axe handles wide between the eyes,” quite a different anthropometric measure indeed. Moreover, “some persons give the measurement as forty-two axe handles and a plug of Star tobacco.” And, we are told, “both figures are correct,” all of which quickly brings us to the heart of the problem, species aside.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 61 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Beck, Earl Clifton, “Paul's Dinner,” Legends of Paul Bunyan, comp. and ed. Felton, Harold W. (New York, 1947), 34.Google Scholar

2. Benson, Ivan, “The Big Blue Ox,” Paul Bunyan and His Men (Rudand, Vt., 1955), 31.Google Scholar

3. Tanner, James M., “A Concise History of Growth Studies from Buffon to Boas,” in Falkner, Frank and Tanner, J. M., eds., Human Growth, vol. 3, Neurobiology and Nutrition (New York, 1979), 515–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Fogel, Robert William, “Physical Growdi as a Measure of Economic Well-Being of Populations: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Falkner, Frank and Tanner, J. M., eds., Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, 2d ed., vol. 3, Methodology, Ecological, Genetic, and Nutritional Effects on Growth (New York, 1986), 263 Google Scholar. See also Komlos, John, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton, 1989), 23–54.Google Scholar

5. Brinkman, H.J., Drukker, J. W., and Slot, B., “Height and Income: A New Method for the Estimation of Historical National Income Series,” Explorations in Economic History 25 (July 1988): 227–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Komlos, John, ed., The Biological Standard of Living on Three Continents: Further Explorations in Anthropometric History (Boulder, Colo., 1995)Google Scholar; Humphries, Jane, “Short Stature among Coal-Mining Children: A Comment,” Economic History Review 50, no. 3 (1997): 531–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Floud, Roderick, Wachter, Kenneth W., and Gregory, Annabel, Height, Health, and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Fogel, Robert W., “Nutrition and the Decline of Mortality since 1700: Some Preliminary Findings,” in Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E., eds., Long TermFactors in American Growth (Chicago, 1986), 439–555.Google Scholar

6. Van Wieringen, C., “Secular Growth Changes,” in Falkner, and Tanner, , eds., Human Growth: A Comprehensive Treatise, 3: 322 Google Scholar; and R. Hummert, James and H. Goodman, Alan, “An Assessment of the Effects of Childhood Illness on Growth in Height and Weight,” Growth 50 (1986): 371.Google Scholar

7. Eveleth, Phyllis B. and Tanner, James M., Worldwide Variation in Human Growth, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 191.Google Scholar

8. Dwyer, Johanno T., “Concept of Nutritional Status and Its Measurement,” in Himes, John H., ed., Anthropometric Assessment of Nutritional Status (New York, 1991), 16 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

9. Roberto Frisancho, A., Anthropometric Standards for the Assessment of Growth and Nutritional Status (Ann Arbor, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See also Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development, 27.

11. Kostermans, Kees, Assessing the Quality of Anthropometric Data (Washington, D.C., 1994), 5–6 Google Scholar; WHO Working Group, “Use and Interpretation of Anthropometric Indicators of Nutritional Status,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 64, no. 6 (1986): 931.Google ScholarPubMed

12. Eveleth and Tanner, Worldwide Variation, 1 (emphasis added).

13. Frisancho, Anthropometric Standards, 3.

14. Kostermans, Assessing the Quality, 3.

15. WHO Working Group, “Use and Interpretation,” 938.

16. Riley, John C., “Height, Nutrition, and Mortality Risk Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 3 (Winter 1994): 492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Murray, John E., “Standards of the Present for People of the Past: Height, Weight, and Mortality among Men of Amherst College, 1834–1949,‘' Journal of Economic History 57, no. 3 (September 1997): 585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Mokyr, Joel and O'Grada, Cormac, “Height and Health in the United Kingdom 1815–1860: Evidence from the East India Company Army,” Explorations in Economic History 33 (April 1996): 163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Kiple, Kenneth F., ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (New York, 1993), 1063 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; H. Bates, Joseph and W. Stead, William, “Tuberculosis as a Global Epidemic,” Medical Clinics of North America 77, no. 6 (November 1993): 1208–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoch, Steven L., “Famine, Disease, and Mortality Patterns in the Parish of Borshevka, Russia, 1830–1912,” Population Studies 52, no. 3 (October 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vasil'ev, K. G. and Segal, A. E., Istoriia epidemii v Rossii (Materialy i ocherki) (Moscow, 1960), 214–353 Google Scholar; Baroian, O. V, Results of Half a Century of Combating Infections in the USSR and Certain Urgent Problems of Modern Epidemiology (Moscow, 1968)Google Scholar; Chazov, E. I., ed., 70 let sovetshogo zdravookhraneniia, 1917–1987 (Moscow, 1987).Google Scholar

20. Voth, Hans-Joachim and Leunig, Timothy, “Did Smallpox Reduce Height? Stature and Standard of Living in London, 1770–1873,” Economic History Review 49 (1996): 541–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnston, Ida et al., “Reading Attainment and Physical Development after Whooping Cough, “Journal ofEpidemiology and Community Health?® (1985): 314–19CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hauspieand, R. C. Pagezy, H., “Longitudinal Study of Growdi of African Babies: An Analysis of Seasonal Variations in the Average Growth Rate and the Effects of Infectious Diseases on Individual and Average Growth Patterns,” Acta Paediatrica Scandinavia, Supplement 350 (1989): 37–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prader, A., Tanner, J. M., and Von Harnack, G. A., “Catch-up Growth Following Illness or Starvation, “/oMrwa/ of Pediatrics 62 (1963): 646–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Hummert and Goodman, “An Assessment,” 371–77.

21. Steckel, Richard H., “Stature and Standard of Living,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (December 1995): 1904.Google Scholar

22. Hoch, Steven L., Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986), 155 Google Scholar; Bohac, Rodney D., “The Mir and the Military Draft,” Slavic Review 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 652–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Eveleth and Tanner, Worldwide Variation, 5; Frisancho, Anthropometric Standards, 31.

24. Shryock, Henry S. and Siegel, Jacob S., The Methods and Materials of Demography (New York, 1976), 550–51.Google Scholar

25. Tanner, “A Concise History of Growth Studies,” 3: 546.

26. Haas, Jere D. and Habicht, Jean-Pierre, “Growth and Growth Charts in the Assessment of Pre-School Nutritional Status,” in Harrison, C. A. and Waterlow, J. C., eds., Diet and Diseasein Traditional and Developing Societies (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 175.Google Scholar

27. Mandemakers, C. A. and Van Zanden, J. L., “The Height of Conscripts and National Income: Apparent Relations and Misconceptions,” Explorations in Economic History 30 (January 1993): 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Haas and Habicht, “Growth and Growth Charts,” 161.

29. Mokyr and O'Grada, “Height and Health,” 163.

30. Livi-Bacci, Massimo, Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European Demographic History, trans. Croft-Murray, Tania, with the assistance of Ipsen, Carl (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 108.Google Scholar

31. Hummert and Goodman, “An Assessment,” 371.

32. Watkins, Susan Cott and Menken, Jane, “Famines in Historical Perspectives,” Population and Development Review 11, no. 4 (1985): 654 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gupta, Ajit Das, “Catastrophes and Their Population Symptoms,” in Charbonneau, Hubert and LaRose, Andre, eds., The Great Mortalities: Methodological Studies of Demographic Crises in the Past (Liege, 1980), 65 Google Scholar; Hoch, “Famine, Disease, and Mortality Patterns,” 363.

33. Eason, Warren W., “Population Changes,” in Black, Cyril E., ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 79–80.Google Scholar

34. MacKenzie, David and Curran, Michael W., A History of Russia, the Soviet Union and Beyond, 5th ed. (New York, 1999), 573.Google Scholar

35. Stevens, James, “The Winter of the Blue Snow,” in Paul Bunyan (New York, 1925), 11.Google Scholar