Abstract
In spite of the contemporary conviction that people from the Celtic peripheries suffered from sickness and death at higher rates than their compeers from England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, it is difficult to gauge whether the origins of the emigrants made much difference to the mortality on ships that suffered a high death toll. For emigrants lacking immunity to the ubiquitous infections of urban life, the ports of London, Southampton, Plymouth or Liverpool, were dangerous places. Having travelled from the remote rural regions of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, contact with water-borne cholera in epidemic years (including infected water brought on board in casks), was inevitably disastrous. Contact with louse-borne typhus, or with endemic measles, whooping cough, or scarlatina, as they assembled at the pre-embarkation point, was equally devastating. Their experience highlights the epidemiological hazards faced by all rural migrants who were absorbed from the countryside into the disease zones of large towns and urban areas.
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Notes
J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis, Cambridge, 1993, 237–8.
A. Hardy, ‘Rickets and rest: child-care, diet and the infectious children’s diseases’, 1850–1914’, Social History of Medicine, 5:3, 1992, 389–92; 395–396.
P. Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, Macmillan, London, 1997, 39, also argues for a debilitating cycle of infection in Australia due to the synergism between respiratory illness and diarrhoea.
R. Haines and R. Shlomowitz, ‘Causes of death of British emigrants on voyages to South Australia, 1848–1885’, Social History of Medicine, 16:2, August 2003, 193–208.
See also A. Hardy, The Epidemic Streets, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, 70.
R. Haines and R. Shlomowitz, ‘Causes of death and their time-patterning over voyages carrying British emigrants to South Australia, 1848–1885’, Social History of Medicine, 16:2, 2003, 193–208.
R. Haines, ‘Therapeutic emigration: some South Australian experiences’. Journal of Australian Studies, 33, June 1992, 76–90.
F.B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830–1910, Croom Helm, London, 1979, 106, 136, 143, 156, 245, for discussions on mortality rates for whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever.
See also R. Woods and N. Shelton, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality, Liverpool University Press, 1997.
FSee also F.B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis, 1850–1950, London, 1988, for a comprehensive analysis of the ravages, treatments, attitudes to, and decline of tuberculosis in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and
L. Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A social history of tuberculosis in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1988; Haines, ‘Therapeutic emigration’
R. Millward and F. Bell, ‘Infant mortality in Victorian Britain: the mother as medium’, Economic History Review, LIV:4, November 2001, 705.
W.H. Archer, Nosological Index or Guide to the classification and tabulation of the various causes of death; compiled principally for the use of the Registrar-General’s Department; with Instructions to Deputy Registrars by the Registrar-General of Victoria, 1862–3 (ed. Marjorie Morgan, 1987).
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J. Sundin, ‘Child mortality and causes of death in a Swedish city, 1750–1860’, Historical Methods, 29:3, Summer 1996, 93.
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N. Williams, in ‘The reporting and classification of causes of death in mid-nineteenth century England’, Historical Methods, Spring 1996, 29:2, 63, points to the vague terminology encountered in infant death certification.
G.F. Alter and A.G. Carmichael, ‘Classifying the dead: towards a history of the registration of causes of death’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 54:2, April 1999, 131.
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© 2005 Robin Haines
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Haines, R. (2005). ‘The obstinately dirty character of the people’: Origins, children, and epidemics at sea. In: Doctors at Sea. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248427_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248427_3
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