Last week, the Wellcome Trust library announced the release of “London Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972.” The open dataset comprises around 5,500 annual public health reports for the City of London and its constituent boroughs, on topics from birth rates to food hygiene. As public health became a greater concern in the local government following the turn of the century, data collection efforts expanded to include topics like child welfare clinic visits and pints of free milk dispensed.
The reports, offered in a variety of commonly used, machine-readable formats, contain unstructured text accounts as well as tabular data and graphs. Along with the text, around 275,000 tables have been digitized and offered as separate downloads.