Public Health
Today in our Welfare State, the
availability of a free Health Service is taken for
granted. Although conditions were better in the
new valley communities which developed after 1850
than they had been earlier in the iron towns, there
were still unsanitary conditions which led to diseases
such as cholera, typhus and diphtheria, as this
extract from a report of a Medical Officer of Health
in 1893 shows:
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The river contains a large
proportion of human excrement, stable and
pigsty manure, congealed blood , offal and
entrails from the slaughterhouses, the rotten
carcasses of animals, cats and dogs ...
old cast-off articles of clothing and bedding,
and boots, bottles, ashes, street refuse
and a host of other articles . . . In. dry
weather the stench becomes unbearable.
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In particular, the rate
of death of young children (the infant mortality
rate) was very high in valley communities. In 1911
one of the highest rates in the whole country was
in Aberdare where 213 children per 1,000 births,
died, compared to an average for the whole of England
and Wales of 122.
Many of those who survived
infancy still suffered badly from ill-health. Edmund
Stonelake describes here the health of some of his
Classmates at the end of the 19th century:
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almost covered with scab,
and another who had a perpetual stinking
discharge from his ears. 1 now know the
scabby heads as ringworm. One boy of my
own age, flatfooted, like a very old man,
his face pale yellow, his large eyes protruding
from their sockets' and his breath smelled
so badly that other boys avoided him and
were unwilling to sit next to him ...he
died young ...
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In the 1870s and 1880s Parliament
passed laws to encourage local authorities to improve
public health. Improvements did come but up to 1914
these were very slow and the effect of them was
not to be felt for sometime.
Poor sanitation, lack of proper diet and bad housing
were not the only causes of ill-health, of course work
in the pit led to frequent injuries and crippling industrial
diseases. The pit also led indirectly to deaths and
accidents in the home. Midwives maintained that the
main cause of premature births in South Wales was that
expectant mothers had to lift heavy tubs of boiling
water for their husband's bath. Children also suffered
from this danger as one investigator reported in 1920:
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Many deaths of children
occur by their falling into tubs and being
scalded while the on mother is preparing
for the worker's bath. One of the ,coroners
in South Wales has said "Every winter
1 hold more inquests on miners' children
who die from scalds or burns than I do miners
who are killed underground".
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