Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In almost every country that industrialized in the nineteenth century, including most of Europe, the U.S. and Japan, the urban working classes experienced a generation-long decline in health and life expectancy.[68] Eventually, the state intervened to mitigate the deprivation and ensure that growth was converted into improved well-being and health. The one notable exception to this is Sweden, where the government passed comprehensive public health legislation in the 1870s in anticipation of the disruption that was to come. As a result, when Sweden went through its Industrial Revolution in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it largely managed to avoid the death and disease part of the four Ds.