Human Demography and Disease offers an interdisciplinary and integrated perspective on the relationship between historical populations and the dynamics of epidemiological processes. It brings the techniques of time-series analysis and computer matrix modeling to historical demography and geography to extract detailed information concerning the oscillations in births, deaths, migrations and epidemics. This book presents a new way of studying preindustrial communities and explores the subtle, and hitherto undetected effects of fluctuating nutritional levels on mortality patterns and the dynamics of infectious diseases.