A Population Falling Ill: The Poor Health of Saxons in the Long Eighteenth Century

Ewert Ulf Christian

Abstract

This article focuses on physical infirmity, health, and nutrition in Saxony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the surviving muster rolls of the Saxon army, both health and nutritional status of servicemen can be examined. The military administration's focus of recording health-related issues changed, however. An earlier recording of injuries and also diseases of soldiers was replaced by a more general medical assessment that also generated public health-related information. From these data a trend of physical infirmity and nutritional status is derived. It is clear that around 1820, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, servicemen generally were in poor health because many of them suffered from war injuries, while many others simply were malnourished and ill. The nutritional status, as depicted in average height, declined sharply thereafter, and malnourishment and diseases related to it continued to be prevalent well into the nineteenth century, a period in which Saxony, a pioneering region of German industrialization, experienced rapid economic growth. Although the Saxon conscript data on height and physical fitness was studied systematically in the middle of the nineteenth century, substantial attempts of reform based on these data to improve the nutritional status of the population cannot be observed.