Interacting effects of nutrition and social class differentials on fertility and infant mortality in a pre-industrial population.

Inadequate nutrition of both the mother and her offspring at each stage of its development - before pregnancy, in the womb, in infancy and during early childhood - played an important role in the patterns of subfertility and infant mortality in a saturated, marginal, preindustrial community. It is suggested that the three social classes had different diets but all were deficient in some essential constituents. Differences in nursing practices in the social groups contributed to differential exogenous mortality and to malnourishment and maternal depletion in the subsistence and (paradoxically) in the elite classes, producing an interacting web of effects and generating a vicious circle from which they could not escape for 150 years. Although the population apparently preferred daughters, the persistent generation effect of low birthweight girls bearing low birthweight daughters probably contributed to the steady-state conditions in this compromised community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]