How Healthy were the Suburbs?

In North America almost everyone has assumed that, from the 1860s to the 1960s, suburbs were healthier than cities, but this has not been established as fact by urban or demographic historians. Contemporary evidence is scattered but, especially for the interwar years, significant. The most useful data pertain to infant mortality rates. They indicate that, in terms of population health, suburbs were diverse and so were city neighborhoods. On the …