Health
Dealing with health
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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.