Editing St Kilda, Scotland (section)

=== Tourism in the 19th century ===
[[File:St. Kilda, Scotland, circa 1890, by Alexander Hutchison.jpg|thumb|Photograph of the residents by an Edinburgh-based amateur photographer, circa 1890]]
[[Norman Heathcote]] visited the islands in 1898 and 1899 and wrote a book about his experiences.<ref>{{cite book|last=Heathcote|first=Norman|title=St Kilda|date=1900|publisher=Longmans, Green & Co|location=London|url=https://archive.org/details/stkilda00heatgoog}}</ref> During the 19th century, steamers had begun to visit Hirta, enabling the islanders to earn money from the sale of [[Tweed (cloth)|tweeds]] and birds' eggs but at the expense of their [[self-esteem]] as the tourists regarded them as curiosities. It is also clear that the St Kildans were not so naïve as they sometimes appeared. "For example, when they boarded a yacht they would pretend they thought all the polished brass was gold, and that the owner must be enormously wealthy".<ref>Rev. Neil MacKenzie, quoted by Fleming (2005), p. 8</ref> The boats brought other previously unknown diseases, especially ''[[Neonatal tetanus|tetanus infantum]]'', which resulted in infant mortality rates as high as 80 per cent during the late 19th century.<ref name=Keay/> The ''cnatan na gall'' ({{lit|flu of the foreigner}}) or boat-cough, an illness that struck after the arrival of a ship off Hirta, became a regular feature of life.<ref name=Sands/><ref name=Cooper/>

By the early 20th century, formal schooling had again become a feature of the islands, and in 1906 the church was extended to make a schoolhouse. The children all now learned English and their native [[Scottish Gaelic|Gaelic]]. Improved [[midwifery]] skills, denied to the island by John Mackay, reduced the problems of [[childhood tetanus]]. From the 1880s, [[Commercial trawler|trawlers]] fishing the north Atlantic made regular visits, bringing additional trade. There was talk of an evacuation in 1875 during MacKay's time as minister, but despite occasional food shortages and a flu epidemic in 1913, the population was stable at between 75 and 80, and there was no obvious sign that within a few years the millennia-old occupation of the island was to end.<ref>Steel (1988), pp. 150–5.</ref><ref>Maclean (1977) p. 140.</ref><ref>Fleming (2005) p. 165.</ref>