cholera

• Urban populations increased rapidly in the 19th century
• Diseases such as cholera, typhus and typhoid spread due to poor public health conditions
• Work of Edwin Chadwick, John Snow and Charles Booth


  • Led to significant improvements in public health
• Cholera


  A disease that spread through towns and cities in 19th-century England, caused by contaminated water or food
• Edwin Chadwick


  • Lawyer who wanted to reform the conditions poor people lived in
  • Carried out research into the living conditions in different parts of the country
  • Findings published in Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842
• Chadwick found that labourers who lived in northern towns and cities had a life expectancy of just 15-19 years, while people living in rural northern areas and working in a professional trade had a life expectancy of 52 years
• Laissez-faire


  A government policy of interfering as little as possible in social and economic policy
• Many people accepted the laissez-faire attitude and did not want the government interfering in their lives, as reflected in a letter sent to The Times newspaper in 1852
• 1848 Public Health Act

  1. Set up a Central Board of Health to oversee the improvement of public health

  2. Local authorities could set up a local board of health to oversee public health

  3. If an area had a mortality rate higher than 23 per 1,000 people, the local authority had to set up a board

  4. The local board of health could then raise taxes to pay for clean water supplies and new sewerage systems
• The 1848 Public Health Act was limited in that there was little funding and the local boards of health were usually not compulsory, but it was an important first step in the government taking action to improve public health