Cartographies of Life and Death: John Snow

John Snow, ‘Intimate Mixture of the Water Supply of the Lambeth with that of the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, 1854’ from On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 1855.  LSHTM Library & Archives

“The second edition of Snow's inquiry was greatly expanded to include two maps – incidentally, the only two of his career.  Snow intended this map of the water supply in South London to be the centrepiece of his study – often termed The Grand Experiment.  It involved a mammoth on-foot investigation of 32 sub-districts of South London, supplied by two different water companies drawing water from different parts of the Thames – one polluted with contaminated water.  Snow showed that those residents supplied by the polluted source were several times more likely to contract cholera.  This demonstrated Snow's intuitive understanding of epidemiological principles: the groups exposed and not exposed to the contaminated water were very similar in every other respect, and large numbers were involved.”  From the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Exhibit on Dr. John Snow, on the 200^th Anniversary of his birth in 1813. 

I am not sure how I missed THIS important milestone, but March 15^th, 2013 was the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), the 19^th century London anaesthesiologist who is considered to be the father of epidemiology and has become an iconic figure in public health.  He famously mapped the victims of a cholera epidemic in relationship to the locations of public water sources, and in the process, made the connections between the disease and contaminated water.  Until then, most medical professionals and the general public thought that cholera was caused by breathing unhealthy “miasma,” so rather than dealing with the root problems of a water-borne disease, they were under the mistaken impression that it was spread by air, and focused their attention to dealing with that problem instead of worrying about the water they were drinking. 

Snow prepared this version of the Broad Street map for a report to go before the Board of Health.  The map shows his original and innovative contribution to the field of disease mapping. The subtle inclusion of a dotted black 'Voronoi' line indicating the equidistant walking points between pumps helped to demonstrate Snow's theory that the Broad Street pump was the origin of the epidemic.

William Farr, “Diagram Representing the Mortality from Cholera in Different Elevations, 1848–1849” from Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England, 1840–50.  Wellcome Library, London.  Farr's Report offers some exceptional visual explanations of cholera mortality data. Contrary to Snow, Farr's analysis was leading him to the conclusion that elevation above sea level was the key factor in the communication of cholera.  Whilst his diagram clearly shows the relationship between lower ground elevation and higher mortality, this association was due to differences in water sources in these locations.  It is a reminder of how visualizations containing false associations have the power to mislead us. 

  

Right now at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an exhibit has been mounted detailing the detective story behind Dr. Snow’s map, and the influence his map has had in the world.  http://johnsnowbicentenary.lshtm.ac.uk/  The hypothesis Dr. Snow was attempting to test involved much more than the mapping exercise, obviously, as important as that map was.  The map was based on a meticulous recording of all the cholera deaths in the Soho neighborhood, and some impressive footwork investigating from where various residences and institutions got their water.  So his analysis wasn’t just based on simple distance proximity, as it was discovered that many of the larger commercial establishments and so forth had their own private water supply, even though they were in close proximity to what turned out to be the culprit public water pump. 

From Mark Monmonier's seminal (1991) book "How to Lie with Maps"

Of course, one of the abiding drawbacks to Dr. Snow’s map was the fact that it is essentially a dot density map, and as has been noted by many cartographers, a dot density map often portrays nothing more than the underlying population density – you can not generally infer any information about the actual rate or proportion of the variable being mapped.  So what looks to be a “hot spot” of the disease or other variable on the map may be nothing more than an indication that there is the underlying concentration of people there, and nothing useful can be gleaned about the variable of interest.  In the case of Soho, however, this was less important than it would ordinarily be, since Soho as a whole was very densely populated, and likely the entire area has a similar enough population density per square mile or per acre. 

The exhibit points out that it was a commonly held belief during the social and political unrest prevalent with the outbreak of the cholera epidemic that the disease was a scare tactic dreamt up by the government to keep people in line, or that the disease was invented (or actively disseminated to the poor) by those in power for nefarious purposes, or even that the disease didn’t really exist at all.  There were even popular songs and poems along these conspiracy-theory lines and broadsheets published, including ones such as Cholera Humbug!  The Arrival and Departure of the Cholera Morbus. These broadsheets denigrated public health officials’ efforts to stem and contain the disease, and encouraged popular resistance against the political and medical authorities.  Unfortunately, these same kinds of attitudes still prevail in many parts of the world today, most noticeably pertaining to AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases. 

And for some interesting things about the data itself, see the UK Guardian’s DataBlog post at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/mar/15/john-snow-cholera-map

You can download the actual data collected by John Snow and his associates and play around with it, creating new visualizations and aggregations, and see for yourselves how incredible a feat Dr. Snow’s analysis really was, given he accomplished all this by hand and on foot.  No computers, GPS, telephone surveys, or Twitter tweets tracking. 

There are a few highly readable books on the cholera mapping story, most notably “Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and how it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World,” by Steven Johnson (2007).  Another, more critical, account of this seminal mapping project forms the basis of Tom Koch’s “Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine,” (2005), ESRI Press. 

Detail of Dr. Perry’s 1844 map of the fever epidemic in Glasgow.  This shows three of the districts most seriously affected by the epidemic, bordered by Stockwell Street, Bridegate Street, Trongate, and Saltmarket, right near where I used to live!  The dots represent the locations of the fever victims.  

John Snow’s map has been called The Map that Changed the World.  Most people (if they know about Dr. Snow at all) believe that his cholera map is the first example of disease data mapping for analytical purposes.  This is not the case, even though his map may be the most well-known and celebrated.  Not to take anything away from Dr. Snow, but a decade or so earlier, in 1844, a Glaswegian surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary named Dr. Robert Perry, mapped a fever epidemic in Glasgow (detail shown above), and used it to make connections amongst poverty, bad housing, poor sanitation and environmental conditions, and disease.  http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/feb2006.html

The exhibit ends with some more recent examples of disease data mapping, showing the important legacy of Dr. Snow’s work, and how maps continue to help us combat disease and understand the relationship between health and environmental and social conditions. 

Dr Vale Massey's Map showing trypanosomiasis areas and distribution of Glossina palpalis and moristans brought up to 14 February 1907 in the Belgian Congo, Africa.  1907, hand-drawn. LSHTM Library & Archives.

Early public health was arguably more concerned with the protection of British interests overseas rather than serving the well-being of local populations, as evidenced in this map of Sleeping Sickness in the Belgian Congo.  The map was used in Commonwealth Office meetings to highlight how the disease was spreading along the banks of rivers towards areas of British gold mining interest and the need for strategies to stop this.

Iraq malaria survey maps: Baghdad area. LSHTM Library & Archives.

The striking graphic nature of this map highlights the urban environment's hidden danger zones of disease.  The dark red areas denote extreme risk, pink high and green slight risk areas.

In 2010 after an earthquake had devastated the island of Haiti, the cholera bacillus appeared, perhaps associated with UN soldiers.  It contaminated water sources, resulting in an outbreak that killed over 7,000 people.  Cholera is still prevalent to this day returning after each rainy season.

Ludovic Dupuis, Ivan Gayton and Ruby Siddiqui from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Chris Grundy from LSHTM mapped and spatially analysed the outbreak in the hope of tracking how the outbreak was spreading.  

You can take a virtual tour through the John Snow exhibit at the LSHTM at http://www.johnsnow.org.uk/mobile-map/gallery-map.html

A review “The lie of the land: Mark Monmonier on maps, technology and social change,”

of Mark Monmonier’s books and ideas on mapping, including some words on the Snow map: http://www.academia.edu/215151/Mark_Monmonier_on_maps_and_mapping

Thanks, Rafael Pereira of Urban Demographics, for pointing out the link to Dr. Snow’s birthday. 

Map of the Week 5-28-2012: Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas of Scotland

Map of the “Yle of Skie,” from Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas of Scotland.  “Continue now, look at Scotland, and enjoy a feast for the eyes.”  So writes Joan Blaeu in his 'Greetings to the Reader,' part of the preliminary material to his 1654 Atlas novus. (from introductory remarks by Charles Withers, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh, on Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland, at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/)

Joan Blaeu (1599-1673) was a very esteemed and prolific Amsterdam mapmaker working in the Map-mad 17^th century.  He received the prestigious appointment as mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company, which was responsible for opening up new markets for trade throughout the world, and for whom accurate maps would obviously have been of paramount importance.  But Blaeu’s maps were also tremendously beautiful and desirable in their own right as objets d’art.  For instance, in many of Vermeer’s wonderful paintings of everyday life in the Netherlands, a framed Blaeu map appears in a position of prominence in the interiors of the homes that are the setting for his paintings, indicating their cherished status as symbols of wealth and discernment of the occupants, but showing also how popularized and widely-owned his maps had become with the middle and upper classes.  (See an example of this at http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/geography-beach-books.html)

The Atlas was, for all intents and purposes, more than 70 years in the making, and for an interesting history of how the Atlas came to be, and all the obstacles, both technical and bureaucratic, impeding its eventual publication, see the excellent account at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/history_behind_publication.html  When completed, Volume V of Blaeu’s Atlas Novus contained 49 maps of Scotland and 6 of Ireland.  It was published originally with all text in Latin, and later editions were translated into Dutch, French, Spanish, and other languages, but never into English! 

Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland and Ireland was a quite a ground-breaking work.  It used the latest in scientific geographic knowledge (and all that word implied in the 17^th century – Geography was really a catch-word for most of the knowledge about the world) combined with “Chorography.”  What is Chorography, you might well ask?  It is a term which has gone out of service, for the most part, but perhaps will enjoy something of a comeback with the recent interest in more qualitative techniques and mixed-method approaches in Geography, all of which have seen a resurgence in recent years.  

From the good Prof. Withers again: “Geography in the age of Pont and Blaeu was not as we would now understand the term.  Early modern geographical knowledge drew upon natural history, astrology, even natural magic and was apparent in various forms: descriptive geography, mathematical geography - of importance to navigators and in mapmaking - and, notably, chorography.  Chorography as understood and practised in the late 16th and 17th centuries drew upon the work of the classical authority Claudius Ptolemaeus (known as Ptolemy).  In Book I of his eight-book Geographia, Ptolemy distinguished between geography and chorography:  'The purpose of Geography is to represent the unity and continuity of the known world in its true nature and location ... The aim of Chorography is to represent only a part'.  Crucially, chorography was a qualitative art: 'Chorography therefore concentrates more on the quality of places than on their quantity or scale, aware that it should use all means to sketch the true form or likeness of places and not so much their correspondence, measure or disposition amongst themselves or with the heavens or with the whole of the world' (cited in Withers 2001a, 140-1).

The intellectual worlds of the late 16th and 17th centuries recognised and used this crucial distinction between geography, the accurate representation of the whole known world, and chorography, the pictorial and written 'impression' of local areas and places, without regard to what we moderns would take to be quantitative accuracy.  Chorography appealed to late Renaissance intellectual ideas of order.  But it did more than that.  For three reasons, 'The chorographic/geographic distinction was perhaps the most important classifying scheme for maps in 16th-century Europe' (Mundy 1996, 5). It was a means to classify existing maps.  It created a standard dual model of how space should in future be mapped. It corresponded to models of the political state: 'indeed, its contours followed the fault lines between regionalism and nationalism' (Mundy 1996, 5-6).  The distinction was widely employed throughout the late 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, Japan, Russia and the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of the New World (Withers 2001a). In England in this period - and, after 1603, in the newly created geographical entity that was 'Great Britain' - chorography was 'the most wide-ranging of the geographical arts, in that it provided the specific detail to make concrete the other general branches of geography' (Cormack 1997, 163).

Chorography's textual features took several forms.  Description of places and regions very commonly incorporated topographical poetry: 'self-fashioning' through versifying was a commonplace in Elizabethan accounts of land and nation (Greenblatt 1980; Helgerson 1986, 1992; Klein 2001).  Chorography emphasised the local and did so historically and geographically: with reference, for example, to the genealogies of families of note, and to the remarkable features in a place.  This attention to place had political significance in that matters of a local nature - notable families, distinctive natural features, historical antiquities and such like - were made to appear part of that place, fixed over time as well as in space. Because of this, chorography - with geography one of what the late Renaissance and early modern worlds understood as the 'eyes of history' - was closely associated with chronology (the other 'eye'), with antiquarianism and with emerging ideas of public utility and of national identity (Cormack 1991a, 1997; Mayhew 2001).

In sum, chorography was a particular form of geographical knowledge, rooted in certain intellectual traditions and apparent in words and maps, that was concerned to capture the 'impression' of a region or place.  It was, textually, an essentially conservative form of regional description in as much as it assumed the continued authority of the monarchy and nobility.  That fact in turn is why chorographical writing often lauds leading families and prominent individuals of note: patronage, patriotism and the political well-being of the realm revealed through its regional portrayal were closely associated elements in Blaeu's world.” (From: “A Vision of Scotland,” by Prof. Charles Withers, at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/vision_of_scotland.html)

Works Cited in above Excerpt:  

Cormack, L. B., Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Greenblatt, S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Helgerson, R., 'The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography and Subversion in Renaissance England', Representations 16 (1986), 51-85

Klein, B., Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Mayhew, R., 'Geography, Print Culture and the Renaissance: "The Road Less Travelled By", History of European Ideas 27 (2001), 349-369

Mundy, B. E., The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaçiones Geograficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Withers, C. W. J., 'Pont in Context: Chorography, Mapmaking and National Identity in the Late Sixteenth Century', in The Nation Survey'd: essays on late sixteenth-century Scotland as depicted by Timothy Pont edited by Ian C. Cunningham (East Linton, 2001a), 139-154.

“The nether ward of Clyds-dail and Glasco” Zoom-able map at: http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/page.cfm?id=96  

On this map of the Lower Clyde region, north is the right side of the map, “Glasgva” is shown in the top middle as a major city (in red) on the banks of the River Clyde, with the location of “The Mills” below it (to the east of the city, but in this orientation it looks like to the south since we are used to north being on top rather than to the side.  Likewise, the River Clyde runs east-west in reality, but in this map appears to run north-south, until we get used to the idea that north is on the right).  Many of the place names on this map still exist on modern maps, with little change, such as Parthick (now Partick), Blyths Wood (now Blythswood), Burrowsfield (now Barrowfield), Carntynenoc (now Carntyne), etc. 

            The map of the Isle of Skye (Yle of Skia) shown above at the top of this post – zoom-able version at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/view/?id=119 - depicts the largest of the islands in the Inner Hebrides.  In old Norse, the name for Skye is skuy (misty isle), skýey or skuyö (isle of cloud).  In Gaelic the name for the Isle of Skye, Ellan Skiannach, means “the winged island,” possibly owing to its many notches and indentations and peninsulas radiating out from the central core of mountains, making it look like feathered wings.  
              "This Ile is callit Ellan Skiannach in Irish, that is to say in Inglish the wyngit Ile, be reason it has mony wyngis and pointis lyand furth fra it, throw the dividing of thir foirsaid Lochis."  English translation from Lowland Scots: This isle is called Ellan Skiannach in Gaelic, that is to say in English, "The Winged Isle", by reason of its many wings and points that come from it, through dividing of the land by the aforesaid lochs.  From Munro, D. (1818) Description of the Western Isles of Scotland called Hybrides, by Mr. Donald Munro, High Dean of the Isles, who travelled through most of them in the year 1549. Miscellanea Scotica, Quoted in Murray (1966) p. 146. 

Near the center of Blaeu’s map of Skye (above and to the left of the town of Portry – now Portree) is Loch Cholumbkil (Colum Cille - Saint Columba’s lake), and in the middle of the loch is a little island with an abbey, and on the little island is a little lake.  The loch appears to be at the end of a river which leads from a sea loch, Loch Snizort (love that name – SNIZORT!).  Unfortunately, I can find no trace of this lake within an island on a lake within an island on a current map of Skye, but I will look for it when I am in Skye next week and perhaps find it on large-scale OS maps. 

I did find some notes about Loch Columbkille in an old journal written in 1883 by a well-known (at the time) travel writer and painter who spent 6 months in the Hebrides, so apparently the Loch and its islet were still extant 130 years ago or so. 

“This fine sea-loch divides itself into an inner and an outer harbour, perfectly land-locked. The former is still known to the older fishers as Loch Columbkille, being one of the spots specially dedicated to St. Columba, who was patron saint of half of Skye, and many neighbouring isles. The other half was the property of that St. Maelruhba to whom, as we have seen, were offered such strange sacrifices.' At the further end of the loch, close to the sheriff's house, is a small rocky islet, where a few fragments of building, and traces of old graves are all that now remain to mark the spot where once stood the oldest monastic building in Scotland; so, at least, say certain of our wisest antiquarians.”

From In the Hebrides, (Chapter 13) by C. F. Gordon Cumming (1883) at http://www.electricscotland.com/history/hebrides/index.htm

Kilt Rock is a spectacular rock formation south of Staffin on the Trotternish peninsula, Skye. The 200ft-high cliffs take their name from the basalt columns which resemble the folds of a kilt. There is also a waterfall where the River Mealt plunges 200 feet straight down to the shore.

The ruins of Duntulm Castle lie approximately six miles north of Uig on the Trotternish peninsula of Skye. Duntulm was previously the site of an iron age broch, a Pictish fort and a Viking stronghold. The castle changed hands several times between the Macleods and the MacDonalds but it was secured as a MacDonald stronghold after the Battle of Trotternish in the 16th century.  Written in Gaelic as Dun Tuilm, the meaning is often debated but it is most commonly translated as 'fort of the green grassy headland'. The castle was abandoned by the MacDonalds in favour of Monkstadt in the 1730s and stone from the castle was used in building the new house.  This left the castle in a dangerous state of disrepair and it has only recently been stabilized.

These illustrations were taken from 'In the Hebrides', by CF Gordon Cumming (1883) at http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_illustration.jsp?item_id=21491

            This will be my last blog posting for a little while.  I have to take a short hiatus for the next few weeks from all extracurricular activities.  I will be in Skye for the long Jubilee weekend, I need to finish my research and prepare and give five presentations in June based on my work here over the past 6 months, and finally I will then have to organize myself and pack up my life here in order to return home to NYC.  I hope to be back to full blogging power in mid-summer, and I’m sure will have a good backlog of interesting tid-bits of geographica to share. 

Map of the Week – 1-30-2012:Great Britain-Her Natural and Industrial Resources

Great Britain – Her Natural and Industrial Resources, from

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/3531527882/sizes/o/in/set-72157618058787787/

This is an attractive early infographic, created and published in New York City, and distributed by the British Information Services, an agency of the British Government, in about 1939.  The map is at the scale of 1:1,100,000, and an original is held now by the Boston Public Library.  The University of Miami’s map collection also has a copy. 

The map is a bit cluttered, (there is apparently a lot going on in Great Britain in the pre-WWII era) but by a careful back-and-forth with the legend, it is fairly easy to apprehend what is being depicted.  I also note the way Great Britain is referred to as “her”!  We don’t see that very often now-a-days anymore! 

            I include a blow-up of a section of Scotland, showing all the variety of industries and agricultural pursuits in the Glasgow area, where I now reside.  There was smelting, coal fields, coal export, chemicals, cement, food processing, fishing, cattle raising, cotton, wool, engineering, and of course, ship building.  The Glasgow area produced most of the ships built for the British Navy during WWI and WWII, and the decline of ship building after the war ended was one of the major blows to Glasgow’s economy and strong tradition of working class trade unionism. 

Historically, engineering was an incredibly vital part of the Glaswegian economy, and had been for centuries.  Think James Watt (steam engine), and Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), to name a few.  (See http://www.magicdragon.com/Wallace/thingscot.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Scottish_inventions for a more complete and very impressive listing of Scottish inventions and discoveries, which include penicillin, RADAR, the field of thermodynamics, cloned sheep, television, anaesthetics, and the hypodermic syringe, among dozens of other things).  Not only ship-building, and everything connected with ships and navigational equipment, but also the design and construction of train locomotives were huge industries here. In fact, engineering and industrial design was such a mainstay of the economy that “Clyde Built” became a slogan appended with pride to things produced in the Glaswegian region of the River Clyde, and it was a catchphrase that was understood around the world as indicating that the product was well-designed and well-made, to the highest available standards. 

Textile manufacturing was the other extremely important industry in the Glasgow region for several centuries, even prior to the 20^th when this map was created.  Wool and cotton were processed and woven here, and Glasgow and several nearby towns were centers of textile production famous the world over.  The town of Paisley produced cottons popularizing the paisley design, with the Scottish town giving its name to the distinctive amoeba-like motif originally created in India and Persia.  At first the cloth was imported from Asia via the East India Company, but supply couldn’t keep up with demand, so it began to be manufactured locally in Scotland.  Although it was originally woven, later on the paisley designs were printed, which made the cloth even less expensive and more affordable for mass production and consumption.  In the early 19^th century, over 100,000 workers were employed in the cotton mills, over 70% of them women and children.

Raw cotton from the Americas was one of the commodities that made Glasgow’s “Tobacco Lords” wealthy in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and in fact was one of the impetuses for Scotland finally agreeing to a Union with England in 1707.  The English Government’s Navigation Acts prohibited Scots from trading directly with England’s new colonies, prior to American independence.  Scotland’s Union with England would allow Scotland to trade directly with the American colonies, especially in cotton, tobacco, and sugar, the most profitable commodities.  As opposed to most merchant endeavors involved in the “triangular trade” between European ports, Africa, the Caribbean, and mainland North America, Glasgow (unlike Liverpool, for instance) did not play an active part in the transport of slaves.  However, the Scots were very involved in plantation crops – cotton, tobacco, and sugar – and many Scots owned numerous plantations, especially in the Caribbean.  “By all accounts, the Caribbean plantations were the most inhumane; the owners preferred ‘salt-water slaves’ – straight from the ship – who they would work to death before buying a new consignment.  The horrible truth is that much of the money made through the work of slaves financed the making of Glasgow as a major industrial centre.” From “The Tears that made the Clyde: Well-being in Glasgow,” by Carol Craig, 2010, Argyll Publishing.

During the American Civil War, the continued importation of cotton from the southern United States into Glasgow helped the Confederate cause.  In fact, the roles of shipbuilding and cotton importation in Glasgow were intertwined during the American Civil War.  Glasgow’s shipyards produced the world’s fastest steam-powered ships, called runners, which were very successful in out-running President Lincoln’s naval blockade of the southern states’ coastlines.  The South had few of the industries needed to equip and support armies of half a million men.  Despite the stereotype of the Confederate army as being poorly-clothed and under-equipped, they were often better clothed and armed than their Northern counterparts, due to the help of the Glaswegians.  Because the Glasgow ships could get through the blockade, they were able to supply the southern states with much-needed goods for the army, including rifles, munitions, and finished clothing, and in turn take the cotton produced in the south to market in Europe, whereas otherwise it wouldn’t have reached buyers.  Even though the Glaswegian merchants were on the losing side of the war, they still made enormous profits from their undertakings.  Glasgow profited from supporting the South in this war, and thereby supported slavery.  Cotton prices in Europe had skyrocketed, a bale of cotton could be bought for £15 in the American South and then sold in Liverpool for £75.

            “While America tore itself apart, fortunes were made by the Clydeside shipbuilders and brokers building ships to beat the blockade.  At the height of the boom in 1864, Warner Underwood, the US Consul in Glasgow, complained that an astonishing 27 Clyde yards were employing 25,000 men and boys building no less than 42 large runners.  The cash rewards for the Scots were phenomenal.  It was calculated that the sum total spent on building and refitting blockade runners up to 1864 was £1.4 million (£140m in today’s money) – a third of which was pure, war-inflated profit.”  From http://history4everyone.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/scotlands-role-in-the-american-civil-war/

             For more information about the global importance of the US cotton crop, see King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925, by Harold D. Woodman, 2000,  Beard Publishers.  For more on the British collaboration with the Confederacy, see Guns for Cotton: England Arms the Confederacy, by Thomas Boaz, 1996, Burd Street Press.  

Map of the Week 1-9-2012:Old Glasgow, Scotland

Old Glasgow Map, 1878. 

            Glasgow - my new home - long known as the “Second City of the Empire.”  I love the names of the streets around here – “Saltmarket;” “Parsonage Square;” “Blackfriars Court;” “Ropework Lane;” and the mysteriously named “Goosedubbs” and “Spoutmouth” - evidence of a rich mediaeval history and centuries’ worth of settlement and occupational identification with specific locations of the city.  And then when trans-Atlantic shipping became the mainstay of the Glaswegian economy, names such as Virginia Street and Jamaica Street reflected where the trading ships were headed. Click on the map and zoom in to see some of the incredible detail. 

This map is a Victorian representation of the secular part of the city in 1547, created from original records by Sir James Marwick who was Town Clerk of Glasgow from 1873 to 1903.  The detail shows the Trongate area.  This is in what is now called the Merchant City section of Glasgow, “tron” being a corruption of “trone,” an Old French word for scales.  The weighing station for the market was located here.  In the 18^th century, Merchant City became the most desirable place for the new captains of industry to build their grand residences and warehouses.  Many of these buildings still stand today, testament to the large amounts of money made by the "tobacco lords," who profited from the trade in shipping tobacco, sugar, and tea. The buildings are now home to the gentrifying classes of Glasgow. 

“Glasgow Cross in pre-Reformation times was known as Mercat Cross.  Argyle Street and Trongate are shown in the map as ‘St Tenus Gait or Tronegait.’ ‘Gait’ is an old Scots word meaning ‘the way to.’  St Tenus Well was situated at the western end of St Tenus Gait at what is now St Enoch Square.  The eastern end of Tronegait, at the Mercat Cross, was the site of the ‘Trone’ used for weighing goods brought to market.  Saltmarket, where the fish curers operated was known at this time as ‘Walkergait.’  The trade carried out by the waulkers was cloth bleaching.  ‘Stockwellgait’ was known earlier as ‘Fishergait.’  The fishermen who worked there got water supplies from a ‘stock’ or wooden well which gave its name to the street.” From: http://www.scotcities.com/merchant.htm

This study, published in 1844, relates to the fever epidemic which struck the city in the previous year.  Written by Robert Perry (President of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, and Senior Physician to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary), it uses local medical reports, statistical tables and a color-coded map of the city to highlight the link between poor sanitation, poverty, and poor health.  It is an excellent example of early thematic mapping, and pre-dates both Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps of London (1886-1903), and John Snow’s cholera maps of Soho, London (1854).  Perry’s map, with different neighborhood areas colored differently to designate the severity of the epidemic, made it obvious that the effects of the epidemic were not distributed evenly throughout the city, but disproportionately affected the poorest, most densely settled areas, where as many as 20% of the population had succumbed to the disease.  See more on Robert Perry and the 1843 fever epidemic at http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/feb2006.html

Detail of Robert Perry's map - Three of the districts most seriously affected by the epidemic, bordered by Stockwell Street, Bridgegate Street, Trongate, and Saltmarket.  Near where I now live!  The dots represent the locations of fever victims.

 This map shows the area bounded by the Old College of the University of Glasgow and the River Clyde, Stockwell Street and Glasgow Green in 1764.  Many streets, closes, and markets are named.  It is believed to have been produced by surveyor James Barrie for the Town Council and is the earliest surviving map on a detailed scale.  Several versions of the map have appeared in various publications over the years.

The map arose from a court action.  The Town Council had received complaints about the state of the Molendinar Burn and the dam at the sawmill belonging to timber merchant William Fleming.  The magistrates revoked the lease for the sawmill and ground in 1764 and had the mill demolished, and Fleming sued the Town Council for his losses.  The final judgement in the court case was made in 1768, when the Council was ordered to pay substantial damages to the timber merchant.  Maps being used in a nuisance land use case! The aggrieved landowner and pollution-maker winning! Some things never change! 

  

Saint Mungo, patron saint and founder of Glasgow (died 614 AD). He is shown with symbols of his various miracles – the robin, the tree, the bell, and the fish with a ring in its mouth.  St. Mungo and his symbols all appear in Glasgow’s Coat of Arms. He is revered in the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and his feast day is January 13^th. You may be familiar with St. Mungo from the Harry Potter book series, which featured the fictional "St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries."