Dirt, Disease and Death: A Tour of Comber's Medical History 11am

Take a walk back in time with Dr Rebecca Watterson and discover how Comber people faced disease, death, and the Doctor! From smallpox to cholera, surgery to quackery, this tour covers birth, death, and everything in between!

This guided tour will tell the stories of those people who lived in this once-rural town learning to face the ever-changing landscape of disease that came with the Industrial Revolution. Disease outbreaks, poverty, and dangerous working conditions were a part of the daily life of the people of Comber.

Without the NHS which did not come into existence until the 1940s, exactly how did this community manage ill health? Where did women give birth? Where did people get their medicine? What diseases were ravaging the town? Did working conditions have an impact on people’s health and illness? What did they die from? Did they have funerals? Did class and economic circumstance have an impact on how people experience illness and medicine?

Medical history is an often forgotten but important part of the story of individual lives and of communities and places. Medicine has often been considered heroic and ever-progressing, but its history can sometimes be darker and more nuanced. As you walk around the town, remember the working classes who built our local industry often faced with harrowing working and living conditions, the women who worked, held families together and had to often consider pregnancy as a threat to their lives, the mentally ill and disabled people navigating a society that often misunderstood and relegated them to the sidelines, and the least fortunate trying to survive in the poorhouse and later the workhouse.

Everyone who lived and working in Comber was and is a part of its medical history. Learn more about their lives and experiences of health, medicine, and death on Comber’s first medical history walking tour.