ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to compare mortality experience in two Scottish communities, one rural and one urban, using individual level data extracted from the civil registers of births and deaths. Skye and Kilmarnock were chosen for study as representative of 'urban' and 'rural' communities of approximately equal size in 1861. In combination with the number of births occurring each year, culled from the registers of births, the numbers of infant deaths in the death registers allow the path of infant mortality rates (IMRs) over the last four decades of the nineteenth century to be calculated for both Skye and Kilmarnock. Use of cause of death information has been demonstrated to be problematic in both our rural and our urban communities. However, their mortality profiles can be compared in other ways which cast light from different perspectives on the insults to infant health on rural Skye and urban Kilmarnock.
