Human Demography and Disease

Journal of the American Medical Association

Scott and Duncan have invented a new kind of telescope for looking into the past, and perhaps understanding the future. The eyepiece of the telescope is modeling. The objective lens is data analysis. To the best of my knowledge, much of what they see with this telescope has not been seen before, with this clarity or at all. There may well be justice to their claim, "We believe that this is the first fully integrated, quantitative study of population dynamics in a human community."

Reviewer: Deborah Rosenberg, PhD(University of Illinois at Chicago)
Description: This book explores the potential of integrating historical demography, epidemiologic analysis of infectious diseases, and state-of-the-art mathematical modeling to more precisely describe population dynamics.
Purpose: Food production and availability, prices of other essential commodities, weather conditions, population density, and the occurrence of epidemics are jointly considered as factors influencing changes in population size and composition.
Audience: This book is intended for readers from many disciplines, including demography, geography, social history, biology, and epidemiology.
Features: The authors describe the difficulties involved in characterizing population cycles due to the complex interaction between economic, social, and biological factors. These factors are all related to each other and, in addition, are related to fertility rates and age-specific mortality rates in a community. The authors propose time series analysis as a method able to estimate the impact of these complex phenomena, both separately and in combination.
Assessment: The material is quite technical and will appeal, in particular, to those with interest or experience in time series analysis and computer matrix modeling. For those readers whose interest is more in the results than the methods employed, many case studies from pre-industrial England, Wales, and Scotland are provided to illustrate the kind of new information that the methods can yield.

3 Stars from Doody