Patterns of children's growth in east-central Europe in the eighteenth century

Records in Vienna of the heights of (a) Military Academy youths born between 1730 and 1760, (b) orphanage children born between 1760 and 1780 and (c) military boarding-school children born between 1775 and 1815 have been retrieved and analysed. This constitutes the earliest extant set of measurements of the heights of a group of individuals. Stature was increasing in the late 1740s and decreasing after the 1770s. This evidence indicates a rise and subsequent fall in nutritional status and is consistent with the known pattern of European agricultural conditions in the eighteenth century. Shifts in the age of maximum increment support the notion of the secular changes in the nutritional status of these boys. The stature of the Habsburg boys was greater than the poorest boys of contemporary London but compared unfavourably with the height of the English gentry and American cadets of the nineteenth century and, of course, with the height of today's populations.