Finding disease and poor health in Glasgow in the 19th and 20th centuries

Grantholders

  • Glasgow Life

Project summary

Overcrowding and a highly mobile population in 19th century Glasgow made people vulnerable to epidemics of infectious diseases, such as measles, meningitis, scarlet fever, typhus, typhoid fever and venereal disease. By the early 1900s, Glasgow was leading the nationwide movement aimed at better health and social reform. Much of this was due to the city’s pioneering Medical Officers of Health and its Sanitary Officers, which is the subject of this archive. It includes daily reports on the cholera epidemic of 1832, which killed 3,000 people. This project was to catalogue the archives, house them appropriately and publicise their contents.