Netti --

Good observation.  There is indeed a substantial medical literature on
malnutrition and lack of fertility.  I did a quick Medline search, just to
refresh my memory, and turned up 309 citations.  Not all directly apposite
of course, although certain general principles obtain throughout.  If one
extends this to stress and infertility the list expands considerably.

The logic is pretty straightforward, a woman whose body is over-stressed (as
in an extended sea voyage in the early 17th century) or in the very grim
living conditions of that time and place, shuts down her reproductive system
because pregnancy reduces her survival potential, and threatens the gene
pool (which is the dominant Darwinian issue in such situations).

Similarly a man's sperm count drops and his libido cools down.

I say again good observation.  Thanks.

-- Stephan






Stephan A. Schwartz  €  Email:  [log in to unmask]
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on 1/2/02 9:06 PM, Netti Schreiner-Yantis at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Dear List:
> 
> Perhaps I should be directing this question to a medical list
> rather than historical, but I have found the people on this list have a
> broad range of knowledge, so hope you don¹t mind my asking you.  My question
> is:  Has anyone ever heard any discussion on the subject of malnutrition as
> the cause of slow population growth during the first ten years of
> colonization in Virginia?    I have a neighbor who was in a concentration
> camp in Indonesia during WWII and she said they could tell which women were
> literally ³sleeping with the enemy² because--as the result of getting extra
> food from the guards with whom they were sleeping--they had their menstrual
> periods, while those who were almost starved had no periods.
> 
> The fact that there were NO women in the first fleet, and only a
> few in the next two or three, accounts for no children living who had been
> born between 1608 and 1611.   There were women coming in on the ships after
> 1610, however, and it would seem there should have been some 13 or 14-year
> olds included in the 1624/5 Muster.   I was surprised, therefore,  at the
> apparent nonexistence, in 1625, of  any child born in Virginia before 1615.
> Have any of you read any literature that might bring some light upon this
> subject?   And has anyone a current medical reference to the part nutrition
> plays in reproduction?   And in the survival of infants born of
> malnutritioned mothers?
> 
> I have put the 1624/25 Muster of inhabitants of Virginia into a
> database and done a statistical analysis of the children listed in it.
> There were 122 children, but only 83 for which there is an age given.  All
> the sixteen children listed over the age of 10 had been born in England and
> immigrated to Virginia.   In case anyone is interested, the children who had
> been born in Virginia included: three aged 10 years; one aged 9; two aged 8;
> four aged 7; four aged 6, two aged 5; ten aged 4;  seven aged 3; eight aged
> 2; six aged 1; and fourteen aged under 1 year.
> 
> There were 163 married couples, all of which were of childbearing
> age, but there were only 122 children.   Only about half the couples had any
> children at all.  It is possible some of them had been married less than a
> year, but this still seems to be a large number of childless couples.  Was
> this because the infant mortality was still very high?
> 
> Netti Schreiner-Yantis
> 
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