Michail Raftakis | Università di Bologna (original) (raw)

Thesis by Michail Raftakis

Newcastle University, 2019

This thesis examines mortality decline from 1859 to 1940 in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek... more This thesis examines mortality decline from 1859 to 1940 in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros. A demographic approach is employed to understand the mechanisms of mortality decline at both local and national levels. This study produces important new insights into Greek and Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilizing the largest and one of the longest time-series yet calculated from civil registration and census data.
Standard historical demographic methods were employed in this study along with the technique of nominal record linkage. A series of abridged life tables was constructed for the very first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age-specific mortality rates and life expectancy. Cause-specific mortality analysis for the years 1916–1940 provided a deeper insight into the epidemiological profile of the city.
Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings presented here suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly as a result of mass immunisations from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following.
This thesis has found that the second stage of Omran’s epidemiological transition theory was still ongoing in the 1930s, with high prevalence of infectious diseases, especially of tuberculosis among young adults and diarrhoeal diseases among infants and young children. Exceptionally high mortality levels were also recorded during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
This thesis reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the first decades of the twentieth century. Finally, this thesis suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, it nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city.

Working paper by Michail Raftakis

EHES, 2019

Based on anecdotal evidence on girls’ inferior status and the analysis of sex ratios, this articl... more Based on anecdotal evidence on girls’ inferior status and the analysis of sex ratios, this article
argues that son preference resulted in gender discriminatory practices that unduly increased
female mortality rates in infancy and childhood in Greece during the late-19th and early-20th
century. The relative number of boys and girls was extremely high early in life and female
under-registration alone is not likely to explain this result. Female infanticide and/or the
mortal neglect of infant girls played therefore a more important role than previously
acknowledged. Likewise, sex ratios increased as children grew older, thus suggesting that
parents continued to treat boys and girls differently throughout childhood. Lastly, the analysis
of province-level information shows that economic and social conditions influenced how the
value of girls was perceived in different contexts, thus aggravating or mitigating female
excess mortality.

Papers by Michail Raftakis

Population Place and Space , 2024

Population Space and Place, 2024

This study explores Greece's unique position as the country with the lowest nonmarital childbeari... more This study explores Greece's unique position as the country with the lowest nonmarital childbearing rate in Europe. The socio-demographic profile of mothers is being analysed in three categories of marital status: married, unmarried, and in civil partnership. Unpublished data, custom-made exclusively for this study from the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), have been used, spanning from 2019 to 2021. Key focus areas include maternal age at childbirth, educational attainment, and nationality (Greek, EU27 except for Greek, and non-EU). Geographical analysis is conducted at the Regional Unit level (Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics
[NUTS] 3 classification). Findings reveal that Greek teenage and early twenties mothers, as well as those with low educational level, are more likely to be unwed, implying that maternity might have come because of an unplanned pregnancy. On the other hand, those in civil partnerships resemble married mothers in age and
educational attainment. Non‐Greek nationals show a higher prevalence of
nonmarital births, and a sociodemographic profile that implies that unwed maternity constitutes a conscious choice for them. This study not only illuminates the characteristics of unwed mothers in Greece but also provides empirical insights for evaluating prevailing theoretical frameworks regarding family dynamics in countries facing low fertility rates.

Oxford bibliographies , 2023

Infant mortality refers to the death of an infant before reaching the age of one, while child mor... more Infant mortality refers to the death of an infant before reaching the age of one, while child mortality refers to the death of a child between the ages of one and four. Infant and child mortality rates have proved to be significant indicators of the health of past populations, and since they are related to several factors (including poverty, inadequate food, and lack of public health or hygiene) that affect the health of a population, they are often seen as indicators of living standards in the past. Even today, they are considered an important factor in measuring the level of child health and overall development in countries. Infant and child mortality and its main determinants have been investigated by scholars of different disciplines, including demographers; social, medical, and economic historians; epidemiologists; and anthropologists. Although infant and child mortality has been steadily declining over the past two centuries, in the past nearly a quarter of all children died within the first year of their lives. The decline in child mortality in most developed countries across Europe, North America, and Australia had halved by the mid-twentieth century, accounting for less than 5 percent of all deaths, while at the beginning of the twenty-first century, about one in two hundred children died before their fifth birthday. However, the fall in child mortality has not been universal: many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia still today experience large numbers of child deaths. In 2021, for instance, five million children under the age of five died, with the majority dying in the first year. Reductions in child mortality contributed significantly to the overall mortality decline during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and brought about large increases in the life expectancy of historical populations. The decline in infant and child mortality has been attributed to a variety of causes, including biological, socioeconomic, cultural, environmental, and geographical determinants; successive sanitary reforms; improvements in medical science, standards of living, and maternal education; changes in childcare practices; and the decline in fertility.

Population, Space and Place, 2023

Greece has been absent from the literature on maternal mortality in historical Europe, as very li... more Greece has been absent from the literature on maternal mortality in historical Europe, as very little evidence is yet available regarding maternal mortality patterns before the 1950s. The discontinuity in the collection and publication of

Eφημερίδα των Συντακτών , 2022

Οι μετρήσεις μας υποδηλώνουν ότι πάνω από το 5% των κοριτσιών στην Ελλάδα έχουν «χαθεί» μεταξύ τω... more Οι μετρήσεις μας υποδηλώνουν ότι πάνω από το 5% των κοριτσιών στην Ελλάδα έχουν «χαθεί» μεταξύ των ετών 1861 και 1920.

Genus

Data quality issues have hindered the analysis of the determinants of stillbirths in the years fo... more Data quality issues have hindered the analysis of the determinants of stillbirths in the years following Italian unification. By exploiting panel data techniques to take into account the possible effect of stillbirth misreporting, this paper investigates the relationship between seasonal agricultural workload and the number of male and female stillbirths in the Italian regions at the turn of the twentieth century (1883–1913). We found that although stillbirth rates were lower for females, agricultural workload seasonality had a more substantial effect for them. We suggest that this finding may be rationalised through the adaptive sex ratio adjustment hypothesis.

The Economic History Review, 2022

The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, f... more The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age-specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Historical Life Course Studies, 2022

This paper employs individual level cause of death data from the port city of Hermoupolis on the ... more This paper employs individual level cause of death data from the port city of Hermoupolis on the Greek island of Syros, in order to test the newly-constructed ICD10h coding system. By constructing cause specific death rates for infants from the late 19th century to early 20th century, the paper contributes to a comparative approach, which aims to show how causes of death differ across several locations within Europe and how they develop over time. Given the scarcity of cause of death data both at the individual and aggregate level in Greece roughly prior to the 1920s, the availability of such data in the draft death registers (for sporadic runs of years in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century) and the civil registration (from 1916 onwards) in Hermoupolis provides a deeper understanding of the history of cause-of-death reporting in the country. Infant mortality in Hermoupolis was relatively high throughout the study period, with water-food borne diseases accounting for the highest number of infant deaths, especially during the hot and dry summer months. While the prominent winter peak of neonatal mortality but also congenital-birth disorders could be partially associated with birth seasonality and/or low temperatures over the winter months. Finally, certain vague terms such as 'atrophy' and 'athrepsy', but especially 'drakos' require further investigation until they are firmly understood.

Social History of Medicine, 2022

The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was the most lethal pandemic in contemporary history. Exceptionall... more The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was the most lethal pandemic in contemporary history. Exceptionally high mortality levels were also found in Hermoupolis during the 1918 pandemic, for which very limited work is available in Greece due to the lack of population statistics. Mortality increased within every age group while the W-shaped curve was confirmed when age-specific mortality is plotted. In particular, young adults and adults experienced the largest excess mortality, while short increases occurred among the very young and elderly due to their pre-existing high mortality risk most likely due to the aftermaths of the 1916–17 naval blockade in parts of the country. Finally, the limited references to the pandemic in the Athenian press—no qualitative sources are available in Hermoupolis—suggest that the Greek government may have attempted to conceal the extent of the pandemic because of the turbulent situation in the country at that time.

Population Studies, 2021

This paper argues that son preference resulted in gender-based discriminatory practices that undu... more This paper argues that son preference resulted in gender-based discriminatory practices that unduly increased mortality rates for females at birth and throughout infancy and childhood in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greece. The relative numbers of boys and girls at birth was extremely high and under-registration of females cannot on its own explain this result. The infanticide and/or mortal neglect of infant girls was therefore more common than previously acknowledged. Likewise, sex ratios increased as children grew older, thus suggesting that parents continued to treat boys and girls differently throughout childhood. A large body of qualitative evidence (contemporary accounts, folklore traditions, feminist newspapers, and anthropological studies) further supports the conclusion that girls were neglected due to their inferior status in society.

The History of the Family, May 2021

The reduction in infant mortality has been a significant component of mortality decline in all no... more The reduction in infant mortality has been a significant component of mortality decline in all north-western European populations. Infant mortality in Greece has been studied before, though most rates refer to rural populations or short periods of time; while the national ones have been based on multiple assumptions. Only rarely there is available evidence about the evolution of infant mortality in urban Greece in a long-term perspective. This paper, therefore, fills this gap by employing individual-level data, a rare collection of oral histories and qualitative sources from the major urban centre of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, for the period 1860–1940. Infant mortality in Hermoupolis was found to be among the highest in the country for most of the study period. Even though it had been argued that infant mortality in Greece declined in the 1930s, Hermoupolis experienced an earlier decline, situated in the late 1890s. Main factors that were found to be related to this decline include wider access to water, changes in the registration system, fertility decline, improvements in living standards and nutrition among lower strata infants and improvements in maternal literacy. Diarrhoeal diseases killed most infants especially during the hot and dry summer months. Despite the widespread practice of breastfeeding in the city, seasonality analysis indicated the early initiation of supplementary food. This paper contributes to the existing literature by extending our understanding of the factors that facilitated the reduction of urban infant mortality beyond Western Europe and North America.

Conference Presentations by Michail Raftakis

The workshop is organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on ‘Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: Th... more The workshop is organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on ‘Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: The Legacy of the Past’, in collaboration with the University of Sassari, Italy. We welcome submissions on any aspect of tuberculosis mortality and/or morbidity patterns during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, both within Europe and elsewhere. Papers may specifically explore the relationship between tuberculosis fatality and socioeconomic and/or employment status, as well as occupational exposure and segregation. They can explore the relationship between tuberculosis and certain other diseases and/or epidemics or pandemics, such as the 1918/19 flu pandemic. Papers investigating tuberculosis co-morbidities and seeking to identify spatial patterns among communities in the past are also welcome. From a methodological point of view, the papers can be based on quantitative as well as qualitative methods. In this perspective, studies may also focus on the state interventions to address high tuberculosis mortality.

The workshop will be held in Alghero, Sardinia in September 2024, hosted by the Department of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of Sassari.

Deadline for submission: 30 April 2024

Gender inequalities and sex-differential mortality in prewar Greece: a regional perspective." 12.... more Gender inequalities and sex-differential mortality in prewar Greece: a regional perspective." 12.00 pm to 12.15 pm Break 12.15 pm to 1.45 pm Hülya Canbakal and Alpay Filiztekin, Sabanci University "Preliminary thoughts on gender inequality in eighteenth-century Iraklion (Kandiye)"

Athens , 2023

The call for proposals for the Conference “Gender Discrimination in Modern Greece” is been extend... more The call for proposals for the Conference “Gender Discrimination in Modern Greece” is been extended until April 15th. We welcome quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing discriminatory practices against girls, stemming from son preference and girls’ inferior status during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. We encourage interdisciplinary discussion with contributions from a wide range of disciplines (historians, ethnographers, demographers, economists, etc.). The Conference will take place in Athens, on June 26th, at the Norwegian Institute.
We are looking forward to your participation.