Public health reformers

Who were key health reformers?

John Snow, Edwin Chadwick, Joseph Bazalgette, Charles Booth

Who was Chadwick?

Secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners from 1834 and a lawyer

What did Chadwick research?

He researched into living conditions of the different classes as well as their life expectancies

What was Chadwick’s report about?

The sanitary conditions of the working class in 1842, using statistics to investigate and prove the links between ill health and poverty - the report argued that there was an urgent need to improve the living conditions if the economy was to continue to grow

Where did Chadwick conduct research?

Rural Rutland as well as urban Manchester, which showed that labourers (the working class) had shorter lifespans in the city than the countryside, as well as a reduced life expectancy to the upper class (although they too faced a shorter life expectancy in the city compared to the countryside

What did Chadwick campaign for?

He wanted the government to supply a clean water supply and invest in proper sanitation systems

What was the Health of Towns association?

Also called the Clean Party, It was organised in 1844 to push for government action in towns

What did Chadwick manage to pass?

Both the 1848 and 1875 public health acts

Who was John Snow?

A physician who worked in London during the cholera outbreak of 1854

Did Snow believe in miasma?

No (unlike Chadwick), so he experimented to establish a cause of the outbreak

What did Snow do in his investigation?

He created a map of Soho (an area in London) and plotted all of the confirmed cases of cholera in that region. He found that they had all been drinking water from the same pump on Broad Street. He removed the handle which prevented anyone from using it and found that almost instantly, the cases of cholera in the area were stopped (or at least significantly reduced)

Who had only some people been infected by cholera?

None of the workers from the local brewery had caught cholera because they had been drinking beer instead of the infected water from the contaminated pump

What opposition did Snow face?

Although his experiment proved that cholera was a water borne disease, he couldn’t explain that there were germs in the water (as germ theory hadn’t been discovered at that point). This meant that for 30 years, people continued to believe in the miasma theory and their opinions only changed when Pasteur discovered germ theory

Who was Joseph Bazalgette?

An architect who designed a new sewage system for London

When was the new sewer system built?

Planned in 1858 and completed in 1875, which marked the end of all significant cholera outbreaks in London

How significant were the sewers?

They were 83 miles long and are still used today, so very significant