Womb to Tomb: Life Course Public Health (POPH90248)

Your life expectancy depends more on where you live and how you live your life than on your own decisions. If you ‘choose’ your parents unwisely and are born into a very poor, or very unequal, or very unjust society, you will not live as long as if you had ‘chosen’ more astutely.

‘From Womb to Tomb’ follows the human life course as a public and population health issue. It explores each stage of the life course from conception, foetal life, birth, infancy, childhood and adolescence through the key stages of adult life to old age and death from a range of disciplinary perspectives: biology, development, demography, population health, epidemiology, public health and policy. Each life stage has its unique characteristics and is intimately affected by the outside world—by its physical and social environment and by its experiences at previous life stages. Institutions, politics and historical change mediate those experiences. Life course epidemiology links those stages into chains of effects.

The subject will be framed around six life course public health case studies that will be set within the broad literature of the demography, social epidemiology and public health of that life stage. The case studies will involve both local and global contexts and draw on specialists from across the Melbourne School of Population & Global Health to participate in the seminars.