In this age of rapid urbanization, with all that that term connotes, it is revealing to view the familiar and ofttimes troublesome attributes of city life from the perspectives of the sophisticated urbanites of an earlier era. Our aim, then, has been to glean from the writings of the ancient Romans their personal images of, impressions of, and attitudes toward life in a metropolitan environment. The period covered extends from the time of Cato through the end of the First Century A.D. If the satirists seem overly represented in this distribution of authors, the explanation is simply that the satirists chose to comment upon the conditions of city life more frequently and more intensely than did other writers. Horace even suggests that satire is the literary form most appropriate for commentary upon the urban scene (Satire II. 6).

In 1957, when William Langer called the attention of professional historians to the “urgently needed deepening of … historical understanding” by means of the application of modern psychoanalytic theory to the problems of history, he seemed to have in mind the use of these constructs in the writing of biography and for the analysis of obviously irrational movements. In half praise, a critic found it interesting that this suggestion was not extended to the “study of the psychic foundations of civilization and the historical process as a whole”. While encompassing less grand designs than these in this paper, I would like to add a further, but simpler, extension of my own. I would like to use psychoanalytic understanding in an attempt to shed light upon some aspects of a well-known problem in American historiography, the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Mauritius is a British territory in the Indian Ocean 500 miles to the east of Madagascar. It measures 720 square miles and has a population of 700,000 people whose ancestors came from France (the original settlers), Africa (slaves), India (indentured immigrants), and China (shopkeepers). Mauritius was discovered by the Portuguese in the early years of the sixteenth century, and was subsequently occupied and finally abandoned by the Dutch, who exterminated the famous bird the Dodo. It was held by the French from 1715 until 1810 when it was conquered by the British at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Professor Perlman's paper deals with most of the points which are important in discussing the relationship between health and economic development. I shall therefore confine myself to suggesting a few changes of emphasis and elaborating on some of the points which he mentions only in passing. I shall discuss first the nature of the questions which should be asked in this field, and then the return of the answers which are likely to be provided as a result of future study.

Summary of Argument

It has long been recognized that upper class Romans in their desire for small families practised abortion on a large scale. What is not well known is the extent to which these same upper class Romans were concerned with contraception. Some of the methods advocated by Greek and Roman doctors could have been very effective, and aspects of ancient contraceptive theory were as advanced as any modern theory before the middle of the 19th century. Such contraceptive theory was part of a lively literary medical tradition, appearing first in Aristotle and in the Hippocratic Corpus; its repeated appearance in our fragmentary sources, when considered together with the organization of doctors’ training, argues for its significance in medical practice, at least among the upper class. Nonetheless, the total effect of contraception upon fertility in Rome cannot be seen only in these terms.

Economists have, in the past generation, become deeply concerned with the problem of economic growth. Of late years, as traditional economic models have demonstrated inadequacies, economists have become increasingly interested in the social and cultural inputs necessary for growth in economic productivity. Human, value-related factors, particularly education, role definition, and the place of science and technology, have taken a place beside the more traditional categories of the economist and economic historian. But these human factors, important though all admit them to be, are, especially in historical contexts, not usually amenable to quantitative methods of datagathering. It is difficult, on the one hand, to evaluate and sample such elusive factors, and on the other hand to define their precise role in social change.

The costs of poor health conditions are difficult to estimate for the Middle Ages. It is possible to establish in a tentative way a normal distribution by age and sex and to define what additional damage pestilence and plague did. One possible index is the number of able bodied persons (assuming persons of a definite age to be able bodied) compared to children, a dependency index. A second index is of the relative number of persons dying before they completed their life as able bodied persons. A third, not related to age, might be the number of persons too poor to pay certain taxes before and after the plague. Such persons were presumably too poor in part because of age or ill health.

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.