GCSE History: Changes in Health and Medicine in Britain c.500 to the Present Day

Vocabulary terms and definitions related to the history of medicine in Britain, including vaccination development, public health challenges in industrial Manchester, and medical theories from the medieval to modern eras.

Inoculation

A 1721 practice introduced from the Ottoman Empire involving spreading matter from a smallpox scab onto an open cut to provide a mild, though not completely safe, dose of the disease.

Lady Montague

The individual who introduced inoculation into England in 1721 from the Ottoman Empire.

Dr Edward Jenner

The doctor who in 1796 experimented with cowpox to create a method called vaccination to prevent smallpox.

James Phipps

The individual whom Dr Edward Jenner injected with cowpox pus in 1796 to test if it provided immunity against smallpox.

Vacca

The Latin word for 'cow', which is the root for the term 'vaccination'.

Louis Pasteur

A scientist who developed vaccination theory in 1879 after accidentally injecting chickens with a weakened form of cholera, later creating vaccines for anthrax and rabies.

Miasma

A nineteenth-century belief that smallpox and other diseases were caused by bad or corrupted air.

Industrialisation

A nineteenth-century process that led to rapid urban growth, overcrowding, and poor sanitation, contributing to the spread of diseases like typhus and cholera.

Phossy jaw

A medical condition resulting from chemical poisoning in dangerous industrial working conditions.

Titus Salt

An enlightened factory owner who proactively improved living conditions for his workers during the industrial era.

Harrying of the North

An event in the 1060s involving human actions that caused famine and contributed to illness in the medieval period.

Black Death

A medieval plague spread by fleas living on rats that thrived in the filth of medieval life.

Four Humours

An older medical theory used in the early modern era to explain the causes of disease.

Ancoats

A district in Manchester characterized in the nineteenth century by inferior quality back-to-back housing, severe overcrowding, and a lack of proper sanitation.

Privy midden

A common eighteenth and nineteenth-century toilet consisting of a wooden seat over a pit that required manual emptying.

James Phillips Kay

A doctor at the Ancoats Dispensary who gathered statistics on the health of the poor, influencing the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

Edwin Chadwick

A social reformer whose 1842 report 'The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population' led to the passing of the 1848 Public Health Act.

Friedrich Engels

A German social commentator who described Ancoats as 'hell on Earth' in his 1845 book 'The Condition of the Working Class in England'.

Artisan Dwellings Act (1875)

Legislation that granted powers to councils to tear down the worst slum housing.

Addison Act (1919)

An act that allowed the purchase of land at the edge of cities to build new housing estates to replace slums.

Clean Air Act (1956)

Legislation that significantly improved urban air quality by regulating factory and domestic smoke.