Fellow awarded million pound grant to study Sanitation and Health
Jesus College Fellow Dr Toke Aidt is part of a team of academics who have been awarded a million pound grant by the ESRC to study Water, Sanitation and Health in the first industrial society: Britain 1780-1930.
Dr Aidt, one of the lead researchers, is a University Reader, Director of the Keynes Fund, and current Acting Chair of the Faculty of Economics.
He says: “It is fantastic news that we have won this grant. Britain was the world's first industrial society and pioneered the development of new water supply and sanitary technologies, characteristics that have given it an archetypal status in the history of public health and WaSH – or Water, Sanitation and Hygiene - interventions. This makes it a very good subject to study, particularly as the impact of these measures on Britain's mortality decline remains contested.”
This project will provide the first long-run account of the relationships between public investment in sanitation and water and mortality from faecal-oral diseases in Britain during the transition to modern levels of urbanisation.
Along with two academics from the University of Cambridge's Department of Geography, Dr Romola Jane Davenport, who is a leading historical demographer and who will be the PI on the project, and Dr Hannaliis Jaadla, who is a Senior Research Associate with expertise in historical demography, they will be joined by social historian Professor Bernard Harris from the University of Strathclyde, Department of Social Work and Social Policy.
Dr Aidt says: “This grant will enable us to break new ground in understanding the link between public investment in sanitation and improvement in health for a period where very little systematic evidence is available. I am looking forward to working on this interdisciplinary project with Romola and Hannaliis from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure(CamPop) at Cambridge and Bernard from the Department of Social Work and Social Policy at Strathclyde.”
This is based on an article originally published by the Univeristy of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics. It is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
