Community Health Assessment Through Physical Anthropology: Auxological Epidemiology

Child growth and development was used as an indicator of individual and group well-being by the English health reform advocates of the 19th century. While epidemiology developed using mortality and morbidity rates to assess community health, anthropologists continued the study of child growth, and their techniques can be adapted to study today's difficult problems in community health assessment. Although morbidity and mortality measures will continue to form the basis for evaluating community health, the study of child growth may add a component to community health assessments that has been missing.