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

Michel Oris, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (csic)
Stanislao Mazzoni, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Mélanie Bourguignon, UCLouvain
Diego Ramiro Fariñas, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

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 cause of the high prevalence of tuberculosis in cities such as Madrid, versus 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 in order to clean them up. In this paper, our objective is to verify 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 next 50 years. In 1905, life expectancy was only 28 years, due in particular to high infant and child mortality rates 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.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 61. Spatial Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases