Topic 3 - A Revolution in Medicine

• For Britain, industrialisation began in the 18th century. In fact, from 1750 to around 1900, Britain transformed from a largely agricultural farming based society, to an urban one. This was known as the Industrial Revolution.
• More machinery began to appear in Britain. Large factories sprang up across the landscape and huge pits were dug up in search of coal.
• People began to move closer to factories and pits in order to find work more easily. This meant that huge numbers of people began to move from the countryside to the towns and cities.
• London's population grew to 2.5 million people by 1850.
• Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham all emerged as major cities. These places were home to cotton mills and factories that required lots of labour but they could not cope with the huge influx of people.
• They did not have adequate housing, clean water or sewage removal and slum areas began to appear.
• Most families in towns and cities had to rely on a local water pump or well for their water supply. Unfortunately, these were often positioned close to cesspits filled with human waste.
• This often leaked into the water supply, spreading diseases like typhoid and cholera.
• Other diseases spread very quickly and easily because of the overcrowded living conditions.
• If somebody with tuberculosis, influenza or diphtheria coughed or sneezed, there was a high likelihood that other people would breathe in the infected droplets of moisture and catch the illness as well.
• If living in squalor wasn't enough, factory workers soon discovered that their health was affected by their job.
• Hot, dusty factories had very few windows and many factory workers suffered from lung problems such as asthma. This left them weak when winter rolled around and made them more vulnerable to lung diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia.
• In cities such as Leeds, the average factory worker wouldn't live past the age of 19 - exactly half the average life expectancy for a poor labourer living in the countryside.
• In the first half of the 19th century, many believed that the national government should have very little influence over the way that people led their lives.
• This was known as a 'laissez faire attitude' and was particularly popular amongst the wealthier classes who wanted low taxation and few regulations.
• This attitude also applied to issues of public health.
• Before working class men were given the vote in 1867, there was no need for an MP to worry about improving their health or living standards. No votes would be won from this. They only had to appeal to the middle and upper classes.
• As a result, public health improvements were slow. For example, a public health law was passed in 1848 but proved ineffective because local authorities could opt out of making the recommended improvements.
• Scientific evidence from researchers like John Snow and Louis Pasteur began to slowly drive home the connection between the living environment in towns and the spread of disease.
• More people became increasingly supportive of the government taking action to clean up the towns.
• In 1875, a new public health act was passed, which forced towns to provide clean water and more adequate sewage systems.
• The idea that most people in the early 19th century did not know what germs or bacteria were is not strictly true. Some had seen bacteria thanks to the invention of increasingly powerful microscopes.
• By 1830, a microscope had been invented that could magnify up to 1000x. Finally, scientists could see microorganisms clearly - though they still had no real idea what they were.
• The main theory of the time was spontaneous generation. This suggested that microorganisms were created when something decayed. It was believed that this was also how maggots appeared, seemingly from nowhere.
• The main cause of disease was still attributed to miasma, or a foul smelling infectious mist.
• In the 1850s, a French scientist called Louis Pasteur began questioning the theory of spontaneous generation.
• A brewery company hired him to find out why all their alcohol was going off so quickly. When he looked through a microscope, he found microorganisms growing rapidly in the beer.
• They were growing so rapidly and multiplying so quickly that he called them germs - short for germinating.
• Pasteur began to suspect that the germs weren't the product of decay, but were in fact responsible for it. He felt they may have fallen from the air into the brewery's fermentation tanks.
• He was able to demonstrate this through an ingenious experiment involving capturing air in a swan neck flask to show how decay would set into a liquid.
• He began by putting a nutrient rich broth, which he called the infusion, into the flask. He boiled it to kill off the existing microorganisms.
• If the flask remained upright, microorganisms could not get into the liquid and it remained unaffected.
• In comparison, if he broke the swan neck to allow microorganisms into the liquid, it would quickly go sour and bacteria would rapidly multiply.
• Pasteur exposed the flask to air across various places in France and found differences. For example, clearer, dust-free air had a lesser effect on the liquid and city air caused more fermentation than the mountain air.
• Rather than being spontaneously generated within the broth, microorganisms already existed outside it, in the air and on dust spores.
• This led to the publication of Germ Theory in 1861. The theory had 4 parts.
• Firstly, that the air is full of microbes. Secondly, there are more microbes in some areas than in others. Thirdly, that these microbes can decay. Fourthly, that they can be killed by heating.
• Pasteur's idea of boiling or heating a liquid to kill germs and microorganisms has had an amazing influence upon modern life. You can see it in the process of killing bacteria in the milk industry, which is called pasteurisation.
• Pasteurisation, or slow heating, made milk safer to drink.
• Aside from this in 1865, Pasteur also showed that germs were causing a disease that was killing the silkworms that provided for the silk in the silk industry