|
|
Health
Dealing with health
|
|
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
More
work on this page to follow.
1150
After the
Norman conquest, small hospitals appeared, often at crossroads or on the
approach to towns or boroughs. They tended to be more concerned with care than
cure. Some tended to act as almshouss and others
focused on diseases treated as leprosy.They tended to
give overnight relief. The name spital was often associated with a hospital, as
at Gilling.
Health
Mitchell’s
Victorian Britian: There were on average 274 infant deaths per 1000 births due to the
lack of sanitation, medical care and public health measures. In city slums the
figure was 509 per 1000. Over half of all children of Farmers, Labourers,
Artisans and Servants died before reaching their fifth birthday, compared to
one in eleven among the Landed Gentry. With no vaccinations for diseases, no
water treatment and only primitive methods of food preservation, children
suffered from multiple influenza outbreaks, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles,
whooping cough, food poisoning, polio, tetanus and typhoid. One death in three
was attributed to an infectious disease. It had always been this way, or worse,
and it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that improvements
in living conditions began. And the population explosion, the final results of
which have yet to be experienced.
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter VIII, the Box:
The general
health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air life and the
abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been largely responsible
for that; but lack of imagination may also have played a part. Such
people at that time did not look for or expect illness, and there were
not as many patent medicine advertisements then as now to teach them to search
for symptoms of minor ailments in themselves. Beecham's and Holloway's Pills
were already familiar to all newspaper readers, and a booklet advertising
Mother Siegel's Syrup arrived by post at every house once a year. But only
Beecham's Pills were patronized, and those only by a few; the majority relied
upon an occasional dose of Epsom salts to cure all ills. One old man, then
nearly eighty, had for years drunk a teacupful of frothing soapsuds every
Sunday morning. 'Them cleans the outers,' he would say, 'an' stands to reason
they must clean th' innards, too.' His dose did not
appear to do him any harm; but he made no converts.
Birth
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter VIII, the Box:
The only cash outlay
in an ordinary confinement was half a crown, the fee of the old woman who,
as she said, saw the beginning and end of everybody. She was, of course, not
a certified midwife; but she was a decent, intelligent old body, clean in
her person and methods and very kind. For the half-crown she officiated at the
birth and came every morning for ten days to bath the baby and make the mother
comfortable. She also tried hard to keep the patient in bed for the ten days;
but with little success. Some mothers refused to stay there because they knew
they were needed downstairs; others because they felt so strong and fit they
saw no reason to lie there. Some women actually got up on the third day, and,
as far as could be seen at the time, suffered no ill effects.