Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes on the Text
- Who's Who in the Narrative
- Introduction
- 1 Town and School, 1875
- 2 Local Society and Local Government
- 3 Local Medicine and Local Doctors
- 4 Typhoid: The First Two Outbreaks, 1875
- 5 Winter 1875–6
- 6 Spring 1876
- 7 Summer 1876
- 8 Autumn, Winter and Spring 1876–7
- Aftermath and Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uppingham Union Membership 1875
- Appendix 2 Abstract of Sums Raised by RSAs
- Notes
- Note on Sources
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Local Medicine and Local Doctors
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes on the Text
- Who's Who in the Narrative
- Introduction
- 1 Town and School, 1875
- 2 Local Society and Local Government
- 3 Local Medicine and Local Doctors
- 4 Typhoid: The First Two Outbreaks, 1875
- 5 Winter 1875–6
- 6 Spring 1876
- 7 Summer 1876
- 8 Autumn, Winter and Spring 1876–7
- Aftermath and Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uppingham Union Membership 1875
- Appendix 2 Abstract of Sums Raised by RSAs
- Notes
- Note on Sources
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 1865 the medical officer of Seacroft, West Yorkshire, painted a graphic and alarming picture of his local area:
None of the villages have any drains whatever. It is the practice to throw everything in the shape of sewage, garbage, refuse, and even solid excrement into the highway, on to the green and the adjacent midden [waste] heaps. And into a ditch if such be handy … Almost every cottage has in front of it a midden-heap …
It is likely that Uppingham a decade later was very similar. However the authorities in the capital might regret it, and whatever the advances in medical science being discovered there, sanitary provision in rural England had changed comparatively little by the late nineteenth century:
Britain had managed its sanitary arrangements quite well for a number of centuries, drawing water from relatively unpolluted sources, disposing of waste without difficulty. The village drew water from wells and streams, distributed excreta over the fields. Prolonged drought caused a shortage of water and a stink. ‘Fever’, never entirely absent from the rural community, erupted into local epidemics. Infant mortality would rise and the medical man [would] talk wisely of ‘summer diarrhoea’ or ‘infantile cholera’. When the rain came, as it always did, the water level of surface wells rose quickly, dried ordure leached into the soil, and the village reverted to its normal condition of too wet rather than too dry. It had worked for centuries without producing unbearable conditions and persisted in remoter country districts until almost the present day …
The nineteenth-century population increase put an unprecedented strain on these arrangements. The population of England and Wales had virtually doubled in the five decades to 1850. In many cities it was densely packed into low-quality, low-cost housing with few planning controls, thus making disease an increasing threat.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Typhoid in UppinghamAnalysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–7, pp. 55 - 72Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014