London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972

Using the report data

Hints from the Health Department. Leaflet from the archive of the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London

The London Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports have been photographed cover-to-cover and turned into text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This page provides information about using the data in your research.

Scope

This website brings together around 5800 Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports from the Greater London area. This includes the present-day City of London, 32 London boroughs and the predecessor local authorities for these boroughs, including urban and rural district councils and sanitary districts.

We have made every effort to digitise all of the London MOH reports from the Wellcome Library’s collections, though some gaps inevitably remain, either because the report is missing or was never produced at the time. We are grateful to London Metropolitan Archives who contributed nearly 600 reports to fill the gaps in the Wellcome Library’s holdings. 

The reports have been photographed cover-to-cover and turned into text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Although the OCR has been done to a high degree of accuracy, errors may exist, particularly where text in the original document is faint, blurry, or lost in the gutter of a tight binding.

Along with the full text, around 275 000 tables have been extracted from the reports as individual files (downloadable as text, HTML, XML and CSV). A small number of tables (approximately 2%) could not be extracted in this way because either the data occurred within the narrative text, without a tabular format, or the table lacked a clear description, heading or caption. The extracted tables have undergone extensive quality assurance checks, but due to the volume of the data, we cannot promise 100% accuracy. Where there is any doubt about the accuracy of the data, the extracted tables can be directly compared to their corresponding page images on the website.

Download options

The London MOH data is free to download and reuse under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0). You can download the data for specific boroughs and time periods, as well as data for individual reports, by using the browse and search functions on the website.

Downloading 100+ reports

When your search results in 100 reports or more, or you need the full corpus for text-mining and data analysis, we recommend using the download options below. All tables and the full text are available as .ZIP files.

Full text corpus (raw text) [215 MB]
All report tables as CSV [340 MB]
All report tables as HTML [412 MB]
All report tables as XML [536 MB]
All report tables as TXT [422 MB]

We will continue to add data over time as we fill gaps in our holdings or include additional digitised MOH reports.

Your feedback

  • Are you using the MOH reports for your research?
  • Have you used the MOH data to build a website or app?
  • Do you have any data visualisation or mapping projects on the go?

Let us know! We are keen to share examples of creative, innovative and academic work with the research community.

We’d also love to know about your experience using the London Medical Officer of Health reports online. Any feedback you contribute will help us to improve the website, making London’s Pulse a more valuable research resource for all.

Please get in touch:
Email: LibraryWebEditorial@wellcome.ac.uk
Twitter: @WellcomeLibrary / #mohreports / #londonspulse