Publisher's Synopsis
Accounts of the Highland Clearances have tended to focus on the political aspects, overlooking the depth of suffering and ill-health of the dispossessed crofters. The pace of the relocation was extraordinarily rapid; the new sites were overcrowded, had poor sanitary conditions, and were unsuitable even for subsistence farming. Destitution and disease were rampant. This is the first book to recount the traumatic changes wrought in the lifestyle and health of those who were uprooted. It examines nutrition, health, and disease in the Highlands and Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also discusses the reforms in religion, land tenure, medicine, and health care which, in the century after the Clearances, began to rectify the grossest injustices. This is the first time the story has been told and it is a powerful indictment of man's inhumanity to man.
