c1700-1900

• the industrial revolution began meaning people began working in factories as well as working as farmers
• there was a huge growth in the population
• people were leaving the countryside to work in towns and cities so there was overcrowding leading to a insufficient sewage system and water supply
• the government got more involved in healthcare
• machines were invented and they were powered by steam and water
• child labour became more popular and there were lots of injuries due to this in factories
• there was an outbreak of smallpox in the 1700s and people noticed that if you caught the disease you did not catch it again so they inoculated people against it
• inoculation was when you would rub pus from a smallpox scab into a cut to give you a mild version of smallpox however not everyone recovered and it was expensive
• Edward Jenner noticed that people who got cowpox did not get smallpox so he tested his theory on James Phipps
• Jenner tested if cowpox gave immunity to smallpox by testing his theory 23 times
• Jenner was not able to explain how or why his vaccination worked so people were suspicious
• inoculators were against Jenner's vaccinations because it meat they would make less money
• Parliament was supportive of the smallpox vaccination as it was safer, cheaper ad more reliable
• cholera arrived and quickly spread in 1831 in London
• cholera was spread by water so was most common in poorer areas
• the government encouraged cities to set up boards of health to improve cleanliness of streets and water supplies however this was not compulsory
• john snow studied the cholera outbreak and discovered all the cases were centred around a water pump
• John snow interviewed people about where they got their water from and was able to explain his anomalies because there was a brewery near the water pump with no cases because they drank beer not water and there was a lady who had cholera far away from the pump but liked the flavour of the water from it
• It was found that cholera was caused by a leaking cesspit seeping into the water supply for the pump contaminating it
• John Snow suggested a new sewage system to the government but they clung to the idea miasma caused cholera as this would save them major improvements
• The government built in a new sewage system in 1875 due to the 'great stink'
• Edwin Chadwick gave the government suggestions to make after his report 'the sanitary conditions of the labouring classes' showing people in cities had a lower life expectancy
• The public health act of 1948 encouraged town governments to improve conditions and and let them borrow money to do so but did not force them to
• The public health act in 1975 made it compulsory for all towns to provide clean water, dispose of sewage, stop overcrowding, check food quality and employ public health officers to monitor disease outbreaks
• the theory of spontaneous generation was that living-things came from non-living things because it was observed that flies came from rotting meat and frogs came from mud
• microscopes were made better by Joseoh Lister, you could now see 1000x without distortion
• Louis Paster was asked by farmers to help when their milk and beer when bad and he could see through microscopes that it was microbes turning the liquids bad
• Louis Pasteur advised farmers to boil liquids to kill microbes (germs) and stop them going bad
• Pasteur discovered that germs were the cause of things going bad or decaying
• Pasteur did an experiment showing sterile water in a sealed jar didn't decay but sterile water in an open jar where germs could fall inn did. this disproved the spontaneous generation theory
• in 1861 Pasteur published 'germ theory' which said that the air contained living micro-organisms, microbes can be healed by heating them, microbes in the air cause decay and microbes are not evenly distributed in the air
• Pasteur also realised if microbes caused decay they could cause disease and he observed this in a silkworm population but did not publish his work until years later
• Lister was a surgeon who used germ theory to stop microbes falling on open wounds to prevent infection
• Pasteur's ideas were not accepted quickly as there were microbes found in healthy people too
• in 1876 Robert Koch found the bacterium causing anthrax by extracting what he believed it was from sheep, growing it and injecting it into mice and observing whether they got sick or not
• Koch developed a method to find the microbe causing a disease: find the microbe present in every case, extract it and grow it and then give it to a test animal that will get sick, remove the microbe and regrow it
• Koch developed agar gel to grow microbes on in petri dishes and a new stain for bacteria making it easier to be seen and studied under microscopes
• Koch found the microbe causing tuberculosis and cholera (proving it was spread by water)
• The government ignored Koch's work still believing in miasma
• Pasteur began looking for vaccines like Jenner had made and he identified the microbe for chicken cholera and injected it to a chicken but it didn't get sick because it had been left out so they reinfected it with fresh cholera and it still didn't get sick. he realised the old germ immunised the chicken without making it sick