ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the trends in mortality and morbidity to try to discover the major underlying causal factors. Numerous studies undertaken in Glasgow during the first half of the nineteenth century provide some of the best statistical information on mortality and morbidity rates for any city in Britain. The state of nineteenth century Glasgow is well known. It was a city which suffered all the traumas experienced by a rapidly growing industrial area. Although population increased 5-fold between 1801 and 1861, the whole of the Glasgow of 1775 remained geographically intact. There was in the centre of this rapidly expanding conurbation a medieval city covering about 100 acres with narrow winding ill-paved streets which were quite unsuited to the requirements of an industrial city. The increase in rickets in Glasgow is usually blamed on the lack of sunlight, resulting from the industrial haze, rather than to a dietary deficiency; but rickets declined in Glasgow towards the end of the century.
