Mortality Decline in Europe. What were the main characteristics of declines in mortality in the 19th and early 20th centuries? How might they be explained?

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Miscellaneous, grade: 2.1, Oxford Brookes University, language: English, abstract: The decline in European mortality which began in the seventeenth century and accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has two main characteristics: the decline in the crude rate of mortality (the relation between numbers of deaths and the average population in a given year) and a later decline in the rate of infant mortality (the relation between the number of infant deaths under 12 months and the number of registered live births in a given year). Many different explanations for these declines have been given. I am going to consider the McKeown thesis which concluded that improving nutrition is the best explanation for the historical fall in mortality in Britain, as well as the theory that increasing inherited resistance to infectious diseases was the major factor.