Tuberculosis and Unhealthy Blocks in Early Twentieth Century Madrid: Ideological Construction of Demographic Reality?

Mélanie Bourguignon , Center for Demographic Research, UCLouvain
Michel Oris, University of Geneva
Stanislao Mazzoni, CSIC
Dariya Ordanovich, Spanish National Research Council
Diego Ramiro, Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography, Center for Human and Social Sciences, Spanish National Research Council

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a heated debate took place between those who stressed social inequality, poverty and malnutrition as the main causes of the high prevalence of tuberculosis in cities such as Madrid, and those who argued that unsanitary conditions in cities were the most important factor. More specifically, proponents of urban renewal pointed to the existence of specific areas where marginalised people were crammed into appalling housing and sanitary conditions. These unsanitary blocks were hotbeds of tuberculosis that threatened the rest of the city. It was therefore necessary to identify them to clean them up. In this paper, our objective is to check the reality of this vision in the context of Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century. With just over 447,000 inhabitants in 1887, the city saw its population more than double over the following 50 years. In 1905, life expectancy was only 28 years, due to high infant and child mortality and the high prevalence of tuberculosis. Our database covers the entire city of Madrid from 1905 to 1927, with 366,542 death certificates that indicate the address (house number, street, neighbourhood) and cause of death for each deceased person. We will measure whether tuberculosis deaths were indeed concentrated in specific areas (addresses) of the city, where these hotspots were located, and how their number and spatial distribution evolved over a period that saw a slow decline in mortality from tuberculosis.

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 Presented in Session 70. Flash Session New Data, Methods and Comparative Perspectives in Historical Demography