ABSTRACT
Historical anthropometrics provides a means of broadening the understanding of "well-being" beyond the uni-dimensional nature of income and wealth levels and provides another lens through which the historical quality of life can be viewed. Studies of nineteenth-century French soldiers by Emmanuel Le Roy LaDurie in the late 1960s and early 1970s constituted the first historical work in anthropometrics. The measurement and description of the human form is a practice dating back, at least to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. In these societies, through the Renaissance and into the early eighteenth century, interest centered on the determination of ideal body shapes and proportions rather than absolute size. Scientific curiosity spurred the eighteenth century development of the first textbooks on human growth. Auxologists and other medical personnel perform basic research collecting body measurements over the human life cycle in order to generate standards of physical development for populations and to investigate factors influencing growth processes.
