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 don’t 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 “sleeping with the enemy” 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

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html