People's health-Industrial

Housing

• Large towns= had lodging houses, which were often overcrowded and filthy .They allowed diseases to spread quickly, as people were often packed together

• most houses being ‘back to back’ where terraces were arranged in double rows to fit as many houses into a space as possible.

  • They had poor ventilation leading to more respiratory conditions.

• The poorest lived in the cellars of other’s houses.

Food

• A typical diet was bread, butter, and potatoes, and occasionally offal meat. This leads to malnourishment.

• The Laissez-faire attitude meant there were few regulations of food being sold, leading to adulterated products such as adding lead and chalk to milk to make it whiter, and copper added to butter. Diarrhea and food poisoning were common.

Water

• Piped water is still uncommon in poor areas. Water typically supplied via a communal pump in the street - often shared by the entire street, and may only be available for a few hours per day.

Waste

• Privies were still used during the early 1800’s, often shared with neighbors.

  • Some connected to a cesspool, which may or may not be watertight - some leaked close to a pump causing fatal disease

• Wealthier people started using flushing toilets that emptied into sewers that then emptied into the river, often where water companies got their water.

Cholera-dr Robert baker

• Common diseases during the industrial period includedtyphoid, diphtheria, influenza, and tuberculosis.

• Leeds was particularly badly affected in 1832. Despite believing the cause was miasma, Dr Robert Baker (a surgeon) believed there was a link between dirty living conditions and disease by mapping out the cases across Leeds.

  • The epidemic killed 32000 people in Britain over the two years.

cholera beliefs

• Being caused by God as a punishment for sins

• Doctors thought it was contagious between healthy and sick people

• Miasma, bad smells, from waste.

Responses to cholera

• Burning of tar in streets to remove miasma and addition of chloride of lime to sewers to improve the smell

• Towns encouraged (not enforced) to set up voluntary health boards that inspected outbreaks of cholera and provide public health guidelines

• Some local areas introduced quarantine, preventing people entering towns, or establishing a cholera hospital or burial ground.

Edwin Chadwick and his sanitary report

• Produced a report in 1842 -compiling evidence that poor sanitation was linked to poverty and disease. It also introduced proposals for improvements, which had some controversy by water companies due to an increase in cost.

• However, the Heath Towns association formed had a lot of Parliamentary support.

1848 public health act

• As a result, in 1848 the first public health act was passed. It:

  • Was permissive rather than compulsory → had limited impact beyond a change of attitude away from Laissez-faire.

  • Introduced a General Board of Health, with powers until 1854. They were able to connect houses and sewers to provide clean water.

  • Did not apply to London or Scotland

Other government interventions

• 1858 - The Great stink happened, as a result of hot weather and sewage in the Thames, preventing MPs from being able to meet, therefore commissioned Joseph Bazalgette to construct 1300 miles of sewers in London

• 1860 - Pure food act, preventing adulteration of food,

• 1861 - Louis Pasteur published Germ Theory that germs caused disease.

• 1874 - Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister and made public health a key priority

• 1875 - Public health act - forced not voluntary

  • Local authorities responsible for sewers, public toilets and water supplies

  • All new houses are required to have piped water, toilets, sewers

  • Sanitary inspectors in charge of stopping the sale of spoilt foods.

1875-1900

• Laissez-faire was much less common in governments,

• More money spent by local authorities to improve civil pride, including shopping areas, town-halls, and public squares. There was also improved construction of housing by local authorities.

• By 1900 most people had clean water, clean air, safe food, but not entirely decent housing.