Smallpox did reduce height : a reply to our critics

Between them our critics span the entire range of this Journal’s readership. On the one hand Razzell accuses us of ‘the abandonment of traditional scholarly procedures’. He argues that our plight ‘will provide a salutary lesson for the new economic history. No amount of sophisticated statistical analysis will provide a substitute for careful study of original sources.’ In contrast, Heintel and Baten use far more sophisticated statistical techniques - including a continuous kernel density estimator and truncation point estimators - in an attempt to justify their claim that our ‘conclusions are without empirical or statistical foundation.’ Because these two comments are so totally different we will look at each in turn.