Join award-winning medical historian Dr. Rebecca Watterson to discover how Comber people in history faced disease, death, and the Doctor!

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

This expertly guided tour will tell you 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. On this gently paced 2 hour walking tour we will examine questions like:

Without the NHS, 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 experienced illness and medicine?

As we walk around the town we will 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 often had to 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.

In association with The History Collective

The History Collective are a group of award-winning social historians and history communicators who work in Belfast and across Northern Ireland bringing history to life though expertly-guided tours, workshops, talks and courses.

The Collective aims to bridge the gap between academic historians and the public by providing enjoyable, entertaining and educational experiences and events which are academically credible and rigorously researched.

Description supplied by the event organiser.