Victorian health

[Skoosh]

Anent, dependency of the Irish on one crop, that was because an acre of potatoes would feed more people than an acre of oats! The best land was kept by the landlords for wheat/barley production & livestock. Ireland, less than 20 miles from Britain, continued to export foodstuffs to British ports while people dropped dead in the streets. We are still living with the legacy from the Irish Famine right now politically. In Shetland the effects of the famine were still felt 20 years later & famine-relief in the Highlands was carried out by the Kirk in Edinburgh & Glasgow or Scotland would have fared far worse.

 Famine in rural areas of Europe was endemic, particularly in the Spring hungry-gap when life was frequently nasty brutish & short. The French remedy was the guillotine!

 The best judges of the contrasting lifestyles were the people themselves, there were no emigrant ships carrying people back to Ireland or the Hebrides post famine. Distance & romance cloud reality. We are largely the descendants of the folk who made the jump, a process which continued well into the 20th century. 

Skoosh.

[Sinann]

Anent, dependency of the Irish on one crop, that was because an acre of potatoes would feed more people than an acre of oats! The best land was kept by the landlords for wheat/barley production & livestock. Ireland, less than 20 miles from Britain, continued to export foodstuffs to British ports while people dropped dead in the streets. We are still living with the legacy from the Irish Famine right now politically. In Shetland the effects of the famine were still felt 20 years later & famine-relief in the Highlands was carried out by the Kirk in Edinburgh & Glasgow or Scotland would have fared far worse.

 Famine in rural areas of Europe was endemic, particularly in the Spring hungry-gap when life was frequently nasty brutish & short. The French remedy was the guillotine!

 The best judges of the contrasting lifestyles were the people themselves, there were no emigrant ships carrying people back to Ireland or the Hebrides post famine. Distance & romance cloud reality. We are largely the descendants of the folk who made the jump, a process which continued well into the 20th century. 

Skoosh.

The thread is about the health of the people, not the cause or effect of the famine and Ireland follows other nations in that the people living in rural areas were better off health wise than those in the cities.
The unusual aspect of rural life in Ireland was that despite the poverty the people were healthier than other nations pre famine.
The potato is a super food in comparison to bread.

[Skoosh]

Anent, the health of people, this rural diet was the very thing if folk could get enough of it, which often they could could not! The transformation of Scotland from a rural to an industrialised society saw longevity increase by a third in the century from 1800 to 1900 despite the problems of life in the cities. TB was the big killer & a slum was a slum whether rural or urban. Glasgow's police force was traditionally recruited in the Highlands, size being essential, the guys couldn't wait to exchange brose for fish-suppers. Poverty, then as now, was basically a shortage of money & post the Great War infant mortality in rural Ireland was higher than England & Wales, Scotland coming in between.

Skoosh.

[pharmaT]

I think the difference in mortality rate in the Victorian era was more to do with the overcrowding in the cities fuelling the spread of disease, the water supply not keeping pace with the population growth, the lack of light that factory workers were exposed to, the pollution and the exposure to chemicals in the factories would have been greater than in the country.

[sallyyorks]

The Victorian period is a large timespan.
Conditions did start to improve in the town and city slums toward the end of the period but I have noticed, on two seperate branches of my tree, that my ancestors, who lived in the slums of Bradford, had a high number of childen who died in infancy. This was in the 1880s and 90s, which struck me as odd  because the city had just had a programme of building better sanitation, street paving and drainage. Though there was recession and industrial action in the textile industry at the time, so maybe there was some malnourishment that affected the health of mill workers?

At the start of /just before industrialisation, there had been famine in Englands rural areas. Most notably in 1794/6 and 1799/1801. This was due to adverse weather and probably also partly the wars with France.

Apart from a bad harvest, due to crop disease or the weather, I would agree that the rural population was probably healthier than the industrial population

I have seen a graph that shows mortality rates between rural areas and the industrial districts in the West and North Riding during the early Victorian period (about 1840) . I will try find it again and post a link if I do.
The graph did show higher mortality rates in the industrial areas

[youngtug]

You must also take into account the fact that cholera first reach Britain in 1831, that and other endemic illnesses accounted for many deaths, Especially in slum areas of towns and city's without sewage systems or a supply of clean drinking water.

[JAKnighton]

One of the main reason people continued to emigrate after the famine was the change in how land was passed on to the next generation, the shadow of the famine meant farms were no longer divided up between all the sons, forcing the younger men to find other ways to live and leaving the women no choice but to follow.

That's interesting. My 3x great grandfather was the youngest son of a large Irish family, who was the only one to emigrate to Glasgow. I thought that was unusual but it sounds like this is the reason for it.

[Viktoria]

Given the overcrowding,smoke filled air,narrow airless streets,lack of sanitation and clean drinking water plus poverty there was a lot stacked against the town dwellers.
Angel Meadow in Manchester was the site of Arkwright`s great mill.
The area was down stream of tanneries at Smedley Vale.
The back to back houses (two houses whose backs were a shared wall, no rear exit just a front door)were occupied by as many a 19 people in the example of John St.
A scraped out cellar room,a ground floor room,a bedroom( reached by a ladder) and a draughty attic.No toilet anywhere near,no water except that from the River Irk which was a sewer for the tanneries. Not conducive to good health.
These people worked a twelve hour day in the steamy atmosphere necessary for the cotton thread to be strong and not snap.Cotton waste floating about as no air cleaning systems in place and you have the ideal conditions for extreme bad health.
Yet housing in rural areas was often not much better,not all had roses round the door.
Again damp living conditions,food not always plentiful, wages at poverty levels and work very seasonal.Add the workers getting drenched day in day out in winter and difficulty drying their clothes ,  again conditions which were bound to be detrimental to health . The saving factor was at least they had fresh air .
The rural idyll was for the most part a myth.
I don`t like many of the changes which make the lives of we oldies so very different from even just a short while ago but I`d not swap what I have now generally speaking for the lives of my ancestors.
My maternal Grandma,a sensible capable woman whose husband was never out of work as Grandad  was  a blacksmith for a firm of undertakers so not really poverty stricken yet still lost three babies to illnesses which could be linked with living conditions,ie damp cold houses.
Also  one older  girl to T.B and a teenager to pernicious anaemia.
My admiration grows for these people and I can`t understand why our interest in them and others like them has been questioned in a previous post.
Viktoria.
 

[Erato]

Definitely true in the United States from what I have seen, comparing rural [Wisconsin] to urban [Brooklyn, NY] branches of the family.  Here's what my grandfather said of family subsistence farms in Wisconsin during his boyhood [ 1874 - 1890s].

"The farming was largely subsistence.  People took their grain to the grist mills and had it ground into flour.  The grains taken were wheat, rye, maize, and buckwheat.  ...  Almost everyone had a patch of sugar cane [sorghum].  ...   By my day, most every farm had an orchard with apple trees and sometimes with cherries and plums.  Everyone expected to grow their own strawberries and many had currents, gooseberries, raspberries and blackberries.  ...   A garden was a necessity [vegetables mentioned were parsnips, rhubarb, potatoes, peas, beans, carrots, beets, pumpkins, squashes, cabbage and rutabagas].   ...   All farms had cows, fowls, turkeys and hogs; many had geese and some had ducks.  ...  Milk, butter and cottage cheese were produced in sufficient amounts.  ...  Most of the farmers did some hunting and fishing.  Many looked for wild berries and expeditions were made into the scrub pine regions further north in the blueberry season.  Most of the farms had a melon patch where they grew both watermelons and muskmelons.  In the fall, hazelnuts and hickory nuts were sought and put away for winter use as was a stock of pop corn."