Transitions in mortality and health: theory, comparison and historical evidence

"The central aim of the present article is to review the theoretical and historical bases of the comparative perspective, in which the theory of epidemiological transition is normally used in order to improve our understanding of peripheral transitions in the evolution of the European mortality rate between 1860 and 1960.... We propose not so much a new theory speculating on the causes of the advances, which are irreversible after a certain point in the survival of western populations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a new way of looking at existing interpretations. Specifically, we have attempted to justify the need for a perspective which gets away from the usual approach, based on a sequential arrangement of the stages within a scale of evolution, and on a causal impulse behind those stages, deriving from a global socio-economic process."