Materials of the First general census of the Russian empire of 1897: health state of nomads in the Kalmyk steppe of Astrakhan province

Studying the health status of the population is important and necessary, since this factor is one of the main indicators of a person’s social well-being. General or partial population censuses play an important role in obtaining the necessary information on this issue and taking government measures in the field of health and demography. The main purpose of this article is to study the health status of the population living in the Kalmyk steppe of the Astrakhan province, based on the published materials of the First General Census of the Russian Empire in 1897. They were also the main source of this study. The program of materials for the said All-Russian Population Census, in particular, contained a question about the “obsession with physical disabilities” of the respondents. According to the current Russian legislation, these were recognized as those who were blind in both eyes, deaf-mute, dumb and insane (feeble-minded) from birth or who became so at a certain age. Information about them should have been appropriately reflected in the census forms. The compilers of the census materials limited themselves to including the physical characteristics of a person as a necessary component in three tables containing information about the family-age, linguistic and class composition of the Russian population. The information obtained during the census for the Astrakhan province shows that, in accordance with the results of the census tables, almost the entire population of the above province at the time of the census was practically healthy, with the exception of 0.32%, who were persons with disabilities. In the Kalmyk steppe, this figure was 0.38% of the total population, of which the majority, according to class, were foreigners. Of the 138,572 Kalmyks who lived in the province as a whole, there were only 543 unhealthy people with certain physical ailments; in the Kalmyk steppe, respectively, out of 122,573 Kalmyks - 480 people, i.e. 63 people stayed outside of nomad’s camp.
Our comprehensive analysis of the materials from the general population census of 1897 made it possible to give a true, as far as possible under those conditions, picture of the health status of the population of the Astrakhan province and the Kalmyk steppe at the end of the 19th century.

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