Abstract

This paper discusses the historical development from the Renaissance to the 20th century of general ideas about the influence of the economy on mortality. To a large extent, this corresponds to the Malthusian controversies, speculative until the start of the 20th century, when statistics showing the diminishing mortality rates in many countries opened up the discussion of diverse theories on the demographic transition. The article presents successively the contributions of the founders of occupational medicine, the political arithmetic of Petty, the ideas of Malthus on growth of the population and mortality, the demographic and epidemiologic contributions of Engels and Marx, the social medicine movement and the founders of public health at the end of the 19th century, and the modern controversies on the demographic transition centered on McKeown's contributions. The 20th-century controversies on the short-term effect of economic fluctuations on mortality rates are excluded from the paper.