Event Type: CPD

Takes Place: 19th March 2025

Time: 4pm - 5pm

Venue: Zoom

Description: Historians often conflate the causes of death with the causes of ill health. The two are related, but not necessarily the same. Sickness was not always fatal, and therefore to understand its history we must look beyond the causes of death to the nature and causes of ill health. This presents a challenge because recording sickness, unlike the civil registration of death, was not an activity undertaken in any systematic way. However, the British Post Office was an exception. It was keenly interested in the health of its workforce and recorded the incidence of sickness for each individual worker. This information provides a unique opportunity to explore patterns of sickness, the causes of ill health and the reasons for retirement for thousands of postal workers during the nineteenth century. Using freely available information from a new dataset (https://data.addressinghealth.org.uk/) we can begin to explore the extent of sickness in the adult workforce, how that changed over time and the importance of gender, place and type of work. We can identify, for example, the key reasons for having to retire from work prematurely, including mental health as well as physical infirmity. In this webinar we will assess the significance of sickness, identify the most important medical reasons for having to retire early, explore the relationships between sickness and death, and question the importance of work as a factor in ill health.

How to book: Register using the Zoom link below.

Price: Free and exclusive to HA members

Email: events@history.org.uk

Website: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-SylJcWGR0G59a8EXY3NMw

Lecturer: David Green