06 July 2018

Medical Officer of Health Reports for Aberdeen City

MOH reports for Aberdeen from 1890, 1895, 1900 and 1902 - 1971 with combined reports for war years, are now online from the Wellcome Library.
While there's no genealogical data the reports are brimming with information which help put Aberdonians in a societal context.
To illustrate I looked at the (abbreviated) report for 1915, the year my mother was born there. In that year there were 654 deaths of infants under one year of age, or 173 deaths per 1.000 births. The average rate for the preceding ten years was 132.
The excessive mortality during the year was mainly due to a considerable increase in deaths from lung diseases (pneumonia and bronchitis), from measles and whooping cough, from diseases of the digestive system, and from atrophy and debility. The increase was only slight at ages under three months, but was well marked in each subsequent quarter of the first year of life, and was most pronounced in the last quarter, where the deaths were nearly twice as numerous as usual, due mainly to measles, whooping cough, and pneumonia.
As my mother was born in the last quarter she beat the odds at birth. Her twin brother was not as fortunate.

Find the reports at https://bit.ly/2lUcMRY

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