The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
Water, sanitation and health in the first industrial society: Britain 1780 – 1930
What was the relationship between WaSH interventions and mortality trends in Scottish towns?
Workers excavating a trench for the new aqueduct near Craigmaddie reservoir (completed 1896). Image copyright Scottish Water.
Although the chronology of sanitary intervention in many parts of Scotland was substantially similar to the chronology of sanitary intervention in England and Wales, it was not identical. In Scotland, many of the earliest reforms were incorporated within local Police Acts and no national legislation was introduced before 1867. This project will re-examine the history of public health reform in Scotland's 'principal town districts' using information obtained from the Local Acts of Parliament, the Annual Reports of the Board of Supervision and the Scottish Local Government Board, local records and the Local Taxation Returns.
The inclusion of Scottish towns extends the environmental range of the study to higher latitudes, shorter summers and colder temperatures and thereby facilitates the study of the impact of these factors with respect to temperature-dependent food-borne and fly-borne diseases.
In addition, Scotland displayed distinctive patterns of faecal-oral diseases, including winter epidemics of cholera and surprisingly low rates of infant diarrhoeal and total mortality (Anderson 2018; PopulationsPast.org).
Critically, newly available individual-level vital records from the ESRC-funded Digitising Scotland project, which include all Scottish birth and death certificates from the inception of registration in 1855, make it possible to create mortality rates by specific cause and demographic category for any spatial and temporal unit, something impossible in England and Wales. This will enable us to investigate changes in disease patterns with respect to seasonality, epidemic frequency, age structure and notably social status in unprecedented detail and from a relatively early date.
Outputs
Banner image credits: Corrected entry for death of Mary Jane Pritchard, Blythswood District, 1865, National Records of Scotland, 644/6, p.134, Open Government License 3.0; College Wynd, Edinburgh (photographer unknown), National Galleries Scotland, CC BY NC; Workers excavating a trench for the new aqueduct near Craigmaddie reservoir (completed 1896) © Scottish Water; Glasgow Cathedral and Molendinar Burn, by A. McFarlane, photo credit Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC).