Something a lot of people may not know about me is I am really, really into genealogy. So, last week I was tracing one branch of the family and I noticed something that seemed odd. 1/15 #cdnhealth #epidemics #medicine #History
Adult siblings and cousins were losing family members over a certain time period. One fellow lost his wife and their three children over the winter of 1848/49. Then another in this family lost two children, same time frame. 2/15
Now, when you see the deaths of a mother and infant, you are liable to assume it was complications of childbirth. Infant and maternal mortality rates were much higher back then. But then you see the 3 y/o, 5 y/o, and 7 y/o also died.... It had to be something else. 3/15
And there were more. The grandparents and aunts and uncles dying. 1848/49 was a very bad winter for a lot of extended related families in this particular area. Children and older people mostly, but also new mothers... 4/15
So I did some digging in historical records. It seems there was an outbreak of Cholera in Scotland that winter. Cholera. What an unpleasant way to die. And so many. And if my extended family was dying in numbers, so were many others. 5/15
What made these people susceptible was probably that they were poor. They lived in crowded conditions, sometimes with several generations sharing a small flat, and many other families in adjacent flats in the same way. 6/15
Sanitation was not great. They didn't have the water treatment we enjoy now. A few dead cows rotting in the river upstream of the city, people pissing in the streets where it gets carried into the water supply... 7/15
Outhouses that leach into the aquifer... And, as I mentioned before, people crowded into poorly ventilated, poorly heated rooted rooms with not enough nutritious foods and often extreme over work.... 8/15
I don't know for sure it was the cholera outbreak that killed my relatives. I will have to steel myself to pay to see the original death records. And sometimes they don't even show cause of death. Or it's vague, like "fever". Especially if the doctors are particularly busy. 9/15
And I know the local papers used to run statistics, often by neighbourhood, of how many cases of influenza, typhoid, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio, cholera, chicken pox, diptheria, etc were active in each community that week, how many deaths... 10/15
And before there was socialised medicine, people would keep it to themselves if they were sick if they didn't have the ability to pay a doctor. They would watch their child die if it meant they could continue to feed and house their other children. Pragmatism. 11/15
Here's a peek at what mortality rates were like in 1850 in Glasgow. Published in the Glasgow Herald, Friday the 18th of January, 1850. The population of Glasgow was only about 250,000.... 12/15 
So, what they have for a medical system in the US excludes the lowest socio-economic class of society from being able to be tested because they can't afford it. They won't go to a doctor unless they are really sick, because they can't afford it. 13/15
This is the socio-economic class that also has all the contagion vectors going on. Overcrowded living conditions, poor sanitation in some areas, lack of nutritious food, high levels of stress... 14/15
This is a powder keg. The US is home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet. In a society so wealthy, there should never be an underclass such as existed in Victorian UK. People who will be the first and most to die if there is an epidemic. 15/15
*rented rooms
