These photos are a precious record of a fairly horrendous experience. I hope they are dated, located to a particular town/parish and explained in accompanying text.
TB seemed to accompany poverty and unemployment so often, didn't it? I wonder if the early, relentess and miserable deaths in the poor houses were due to punitive community attitudes to paupers (make life horrible inside the poor house so paupers won't want to enter for an easy life) or an inability to control and cure diseases like TB.
I guess it was both Helen. My Mother, who is 84, can remember TB in the East End of London. The work house was definately and deliberately a lace of last resort, in the theory that being poor was preventable. The same nonsense is still used in welfare debates but the poor today - but by the rich of course!
These photos are a precious record of a fairly horrendous experience. I hope they are dated, located to a particular town/parish and explained in accompanying text.
ReplyDeleteTB seemed to accompany poverty and unemployment so often, didn't it? I wonder if the early, relentess and miserable deaths in the poor houses were due to punitive community attitudes to paupers (make life horrible inside the poor house so paupers won't want to enter for an easy life) or an inability to control and cure diseases like TB.
I guess it was both Helen. My Mother, who is 84, can remember TB in the East End of London. The work house was definately and deliberately a lace of last resort, in the theory that being poor was preventable. The same nonsense is still used in welfare debates but the poor today - but by the rich of course!
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