Health & Medicine

For much of the nineteenth century Glasgow was one of the unhealthiest cities in Europe. Its population multiplied as industry drew in workers from the Highlands and Ireland, and tenements built for profit rather than health became breeding grounds for disease. Cholera struck four times between 1832 and 1866, alongside typhus, smallpox and tuberculosis.

The city’s response made it a pioneer of public health. The Loch Katrine water scheme, begun in 1855 and opened by Queen Victoria in 1859, brought clean water from the Trossachs and greatly reduced the toll of the last cholera outbreak. From 1863 Glasgow appointed Medical Officers of Health, and under James Burn Russell, who took the post in 1872, the city built fever hospitals, mapped disease street by street and campaigned against the overcrowded one-room house. Public health reforms tells that story.

Glasgow’s hospitals have been at the forefront of medicine. The Royal Infirmary, opened in 1794 beside the cathedral, is where Joseph Lister developed antiseptic surgery in the 1860s and where William Macewen later pioneered brain surgery. The Western Infirmary served the West End and the university for more than a century. Medical discoveries also covers Ian Donald's obstetric ultrasound, developed in the city in the 1950s.

Epidemics have returned in modern times. The Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 killed thousands in the city, and during Covid-19 the SEC was converted into NHS Louisa Jordan, a field hospital that was ready by 19 April 2020. The city still lives with the ‘Glasgow effect’, the excess mortality that remains even after poverty and deprivation are taken into account, a reminder that the story of its health is not yet finished.