Sanitary and Epidemiological Situation in Kyiv in Conditions of Social Instability on the Pages of the City Press at the End of the End of the 19th – Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the issue of health care and urban economy, on the pages of periodicals: “Kievlyanin”, “Kievskie Vesti”, “Kievskaya Mysl”, “Yuzhnaya Kopeyka”. at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

The study of the historical experience of the city in times of pandemics acquires special importance, and the study of the communication process in times of social upheaval acquires new relevance. The analysis of newspaper periodicals, as a key communication space of the 19th and early 20th centuries, makes it possible to find out the informational potential of newspaper messages in the study of the city's health care system, to determine the prerequisites of epidemic outbreaks in Kyiv. For more professional processing of newspaper information, content analysis was used, the essence of which is the selection, fixation and measurement of the frequency of the usage of repeated text fragments.

Processing of newspaper materials made it possible to: identify problematic areas of work of the city government in the sanitary and communal spheres, namely, inadequate control over compliance with hygienic standards in places of social activity, the inadequacy of the city economic system to the needs of the time, underdevelopment of water supply and sewerage systems, spontaneous landfills, an increase in the number of homeless people and other marginal representatives.

These factors were a prerequisite for infectious outbreaks in the city. The analysis of reference data makes it possible to compare the logic of the presentation of sanitary and medical information, and, in addition, to monitor the dynamics of the course of epidemics, to establish specific diseases for each district of the city, depending on their location, population quota, placement of objects that are centres of epidemic and social instability, namely, prisons, bazaars, cemeteries, hospitals.