The Social Geography of Childhood Mortality, Toronto, 1901

Urban geographers and historians have long recognized the relationship between cities and poor health, though few have documented this relationship for cities in the past. While trends, and national or regional variations, of mortality rates are well documented for Britain and Europe, the picture is less complete for North America. Through the use of household data aggregated to the neighborhood scale, this paper explores the spatial variation of childhood mortality (deaths under the age of five) in relation to the social geography of Toronto, Canada, in 1901. Examination of individual records illustrate that the traditional dichotomous relationship between suburban and inner-city areas, in terms of health status (mortality), did not exist in turn of the 20th century Toronto. Rather, inner-city slums and suburban fringe areas were found to be equally likely to have high levels of childhood mortality. Furthermore, the neighborhood spatial patterns of childhood mortality were more affected by the residential segregation of religious groups (e.g., Catholics and Jews) than the distribution of households by social class or the housing conditions in which the people lived.