The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700
by Robert Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong
Cambridge University Press, 431 pp., $32.99 (paper)
According to family lore, my father’s mother, Rebecca Kapalovich, arrived at Ellis Island on the day that President William McKinley was shot, September 6, 1901. Sixteen years old, standing less than five feet tall, slim in build, she had left an impoverished village in Russia to seek a better life. Cousins took her into their tenement flat and she soon began sewing clothes in a dark, airless sweatshop on Rivington Street. She and other immigrants on the Lower East Side were exposed to tuberculosis, diphtheria, and pertussis. Subsistence wages made a healthy diet impossible, and disorders like rickets that stunted growth were not uncommon.
