Defeating Disease: Lasting Effects of Public Health and Medical Breakthroughs between 1880 and 1945 on Health and Income in Sweden

This project has the general aim of exploring the role of public health and medical innovations between 1880 and 1945, targeting infectious diseases, in health and income improvements in Sweden throughout the twentieth century. It applies methods of causal inference to longitudinal individual-level data from both local and national datasets combined with multisource archival data on the implementation of reforms. The bacteriological discoveries of the latter part of the nineteenth century helped the public to target infectious diseases through isolation, disinfection and treatment with antibiotics. The studies of this project show that health interventions implementing these tools have had a sizable role in the contemporaneous decline in infectious disease rates. Moreover, these studies find that by reducing the likelihood of infection, societal health measures led to beneficial consequences for the income and long-term health of the affected cohorts, extending through old age.