Glasgow’s response to cholera was catastrophic

I will chart both the boom times, starting with the railways, and the upsets over the next few weeks, but no one can write the history of Glasgow in the 19th century without mentioning the devastation caused to the citizens by disease and ill-health.   

In the first half of the 19th century Glasgow suffered egregiously due to large-scale infections within the city caused by a typhus and a more dreadful, and indeed much dreaded, disease – cholera.

When looking back to the early 1830s, it needs to be borne in mind that there was no NHS, very primitive supplies of water and heat, and housing conditions that were neither able nor ready to support an ever-growing population. Medical examination of diseases like cholera was in its infancy, and the connection between dirty houses, dirty water, dirty people and cholera had not been realised – it would take until the 1850s for scientists to prove the link.

There had been a cholera pandemic that started in India and raged across Asia, the Middle East and Europe from 1817 to 1824. The expansion of the British Empire and the movements of British military forces and mercantile ships undoubtedly helped to spread it before the pandemic stopped.      

Still no one made the connection between contaminated water and infected people and the spread of the disease, and when cholera reappeared as a pandemic in 1826 in both Europe and North America there was soon to be a disastrous example in Glasgow of what happens when you put too many humans in too few houses with little or no sanitation.

 In 1832, the year of political reform, Glasgow was struck by an epidemic of cholera that lasted from February to November.  We know more about that epidemic than any previous outbreak in the city because it was thoroughly researched. It was also almost certainly transmitted from Europe and Egypt via London where more than 6,500 people died, the disease becoming known as King Cholera.  

In a city like Glasgow, cholera spreads via infected people and contaminated water, with dehydration, mostly through diarrhoea, being the worst and usually fatal outcome of the disease which killed thousands in Glasgow over a period of nine months.  

In his comprehensive 1947 History of Cholera in Great Britain, Dumfries-born and Glasgow University-educated Dr Edgar Ashworth Underwood (1899-1980) showed how in December 1831, a ‘new variant’ cholera, designated Asiatic, spread north from England up the east coast during that month -  it became known as the Christmas Cholera. 

Dr Underwood wrote: “Gateshead and other Tyneside towns were attacked about Christmas or the New Year. Almost contemporaneously cholera appeared in Haddington. The first case occurred on December 17, and the next on the 25th. By February 23 there had been 125 cases with 54 deaths. A little later the Tranent area was affected. The town of Tranent itself, with a population of 1,631 persons, had 204 cases and 64 deaths; and the villages of Cockenzie and Port Seton, and the town of Prestonpans, with a total population of 2,717 persons, had 195 cases and 36 deaths.

“The small town of Musselburgh suffered a devastating attack, and between January 18 and February 22 there were over 400 cases and 202 deaths. The next areas to suffer the dire effects of the new disease were the large cities and the industrial centres, Edinburgh at the end of January, and Glasgow during the second week of February. In each the disease seemed to be exhausting itself about the beginning of the summer, but in July and August it sprang to life again in an even more violent form.”

What it did to Glasgow still beggars the imagination, with a mortality rate which if repeated in the modern population of the city would be around 10,000 – more than have died in Scotland as a result of Covid-19.  

Details of the Glasgow outbreak can be found in The New Statistical Account of Scotland which was published in the 1840s by eminent statisticians led by the Very Reverend Duncan Macfarlane, Principal of the Glasgow College - one of Her Majesty's Chaplains for Scotland, no less - who relied on the earlier work of former Bailie James Cleland and the contributions of the Kirk’s clergy in and around Glasgow. 

The Account stated:  “That dreadful epidemic, cholera morbus, showed itself in this city on the 12th February 1832, and continued to 11th November. During that period there were 6,208 cases, 3,203 recoveries, and 3,005 deaths, viz. males, 1,289; females 1,716.

“It was found that there had been three eruptions of cholera marked by the reduced number of cases happening about the 3rd of June, the 16th September, and the 11th November. Each eruption had a period of increase. In the first eruption, persons poorly fed, of irregular habits, and dwelling in the crowded ill-aired parts of the city, were chiefly affected.

“The second eruption was more severe, the attacks were more scattered over the town, and many healthy persons, and in easy circumstances, fell victims to the disease. The last eruption was milder than the second, but still surpassing the first, both in the number of cases and in the healthy and good condition of many of the sufferers.

“The total number of cases, 6208, is one for about every 32 of the population. The total number of deaths, 3005, is one for about every 67 of the population. The progress of the disease was such as to have seized one victim for about every six families, and to have occasioned one death for about every thirteen families.”

Another 446 people were also killed in the Paisley area and 436 in Greenock. Most of those who died in Paisley were buried in a mass grave, a so-called cholera pit, which is now St James’s Park.

It was a disaster that in Scotland was largely confined to Clydeside where the mortality rate was higher than anywhere outside London. In truth this was a genuine pandemic, and it appears that modern society has still not learned the lessons about diseases that can spread so quickly.

Sadly I will have to return to the subject of cholera and other diseases in Glasgow later.