I am going to bet that the lower down the social scale you were the more likely you were to be syphilitic rather than neurasthenic. Presume you've read Gayle Davis' "The Cruel Madness of Love"? There was some fervent eugenic searching for congenital syphilis in pre-WW1 Glasgow too.

Drat, meant to include a link to the report in that last skeet, here it is instead: wellcomecollection.org/works/fa775tbg

So: illuminated trams, random chicken distribution, X-Ray Rock and emergency safety-pin delivery make for a massively successful public health campaign. Go Glasgow! (17/17)

27,000 were X-rayed on that first day. The demand was such that the technicians had to keep putting wet cloths on the X-ray machines to stop them overheating.
"The results were a credit to the good humour and good sense of the citizens of Glasgow." (16/?)

Special services were held all denominations' churches and in the synagogues in a moment for woke inclusivity.
Thousands of volunteers were involved, with 8000 alone delivering letters about the campaign.
People started queuing for X-rays over an hour before they opened on the first day (15/?)

George Square was decided on as the focal point of the campaign, being "normally rather dull and deserted in the evenings" it was lit up and decorated. There was a massive opening ceremony with bands and runners ran from the square with torches to each of the local centres (14/?)

(As a side note, read about Annie Gibbons and getting toilets into tenement flats www.greatergovanhill.com/latest/annie...) (13/?)

These prizes were serious - a tv, a fridge, a washing machine, and the grand prize was a car. This was at a time when many tenements had one toilet on the landing shared between a number of flats, so the washing machine may have been a little mis-aimed. (12/?)

the whole tenement and the whole street knew that Mrs. -- had received a chicken for being X-rayed and wearing her badge."
Yes, there were people just randomly handing out chickens to wee wifeys in the street. You also got entered into a prize draw for a bigger prize. (11/?)

Local businesses donated small prizes, and people who had been X-rayed would be chosen randomly to receive one. "The most favoured recipients were elderly women who were given chickens. Many of them regarded the present of a chicken as an occasion for a party, and very soon...(10/?)

So many people needed badges that the *entire city* ran out of safety pins and an emergency supply had to be put on the first express train from Birmingham. This is page 168 in the report if you think I'm making this up. And next: the chickens. (9/?)

You also got a badge when you were X-rayed. They ordered 250,000, realised by day 3 this was a vast under-estimate but could only get another 100,000 before the campaign ended, so they started making cardboard ones, but... (8/?)

They wanted a campaign song, but could only find an American one "which would probably have been unintelligible to Glasgow audiences". So they wrote and recorded two of their own, one of which was called "X-Ray Rock". I cannot find audio of this which is a crying shame (7/?)

Publicity was a massive part of the campaign - everything from posters and stickers to bookmarks in library books, pavement stencils and milk bottle tops.
Note: only incomers to Glasgow like me find the placename "Dykebar" funny. (6/?)

Local and national governmental and health organisations worked together to bring mobile X-Ray units and staff to Glasgow from across the UK. Visiting staff got "outings to the Trossachs and down the river on each of the available Sundays" (5/?)

The mass X-Ray campaign ran for 5 weeks, from 11th March-12th April 1957. A truly jaw-dropping 714, 915 people were X-Rayed, 622,349 of whom lived in Glasgow. That meant that 76% of the population had been X-rayed in those 5 weeks. They found 2,369 cases of active TB. (4/?)

And this table compares incidence rates in Glasgow to other cities in the UK - higher than places which you'd think would have similar rates like Dundee and Liverpool. The "Glasgow Effect" is a later term for this sort of health disparity: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow... (3/?)

This graph shows the worse TB rates were in Glasgow compared to the rest of Scotland. Look at that uptick during the Second World War - more overcrowding perhaps?
This is scanned from a copy in the London Schl of Hygiene & Tropical Med, for who corrected the numbers! (2/?)

Call that a mass X-Ray campaign? THIS is a mass X-Ray campaign!
Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...