The back-to-back housing arrangement meant there was a very poor standard of hygiene which, together with the problem of overcrowding, encouraged the spread of disease. Sanitation was a major cause for concern during this period. The communal toilet facilities were not connected to a sewage system but drained into cesspits which were emptied by hand by night soilmen. As a result of lack of proper drainage theses cesspits would often overflow and run into the streets. Some landlords would sometimes refuse for cesspits to be emptied if they thought that it would cost too much money. Animal manure also ended up in the streets and the stench of human and animal excrement could be detected all throughout the area and within miles of the town or city radius. Water supplies were scarce during this time and many towns got their water from a nearby river. However, the river was also usually the town’s major cesspit from which all the sewers (from all the areas which were lucky enough to have a drainage system) ran into. As a result the river water was always polluted and people were effectively drinking, bathing and washing their clothes in their own excrement. London’s entire water supply came from the River Thames which had over two hundred and fifty sewers emptied into it. The smell emitted from the Thames became so bad that the House of Commons had to move to a new site.
The poor condition of hygiene led to the spread of disease and the death rate from infectious diseases was extraordinarily high. Statistics show that one in three children in 1840 died before the age of five. There were many common diseases during this time such as cholera, scrofula and diphtheria but perhaps the most terrible of these diseases was cholera. Cholera had a high fatality percentage (40-60%) and could strike with great speed. The first cholera epidemic appeared in 1832, killing approximately 32 000 people in the whole of Britain. A worse epidemic of the disease appeared in 1848, killing 67 000 people and resulting in cholera claiming the lives of over 90 000 people. These epidemics had a profound effect upon the public demonstrated by widespread rioting in towns and cities throughout Britain in 1832. The cause of the riots was dubbed ‘cholera phobia’, which arose out of panic at the rumours of medical students stealing bodies, doctors murdering cholera victims and victims being buried alive due to the haste they were buried in to try and control the spread of the disease. It was true that there were unsatisfactory measures for funerals and burials at this time. During the cholera epidemics bodies were buried quickly to try and prevent the spread of the disease, which resulted in shallow graves and overcrowding in the cemeteries. The panic of trying to bury cholera victims as quickly as possible was not actually necessary as cholera is not an infectious disease but is passed through the water supply. However, this overcrowding resulted, in turn, in the inability to bury people within sufficient time of their deaths, and corpses were often kept in their family’s house for over a week before burial, even when their death was due to infectious disease.
Although a ‘Temporary Board of Health’ was set up in 1831 and emergency ‘cholera acts’ were passed to deal with the outbreaks of the epidemics, legislation was permissive and action taken to deal with the disease was haphazard.
The cholera epidemics provided a stimulus for the reform of public health and reports, investigations and enquiries occurred to provide the legislators in government the incentive to pass laws to improve the state of public health. Probably the most important of the campaigners for social reform was Edwin Chadwick. Edwin Chadwick was born into a poor, working class family in Manchester in 1800. He started out as a lawyer and then became a journalist; his articles on social reform inspired the attentions of Jeremy Bentham and influenced Chadwick to work as an investigator for the Poor Law Commission. In 1833 Chadwick became the Chief Commissioner to the Poor Law Reform, a position in which he made his opinion of the Poor Law being connected to public health frequently known. Chadwick is most famous for his ‘Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Poor’, published in 1842. The report was a major success in focusing attention to the need for state intervention to effect significant improvement to public health. The report mentioned the inadequate water supplies, complained about the drainage and sewage facilities in place, the cause of the problems and the identification of a connection between living conditions and public health. Chadwick’s report influenced legislation a great deal and a number of acts were passed after the publication of the report which identified the areas where legislation should be implemented. The Municipal Corporations act of 1835 gave authorities a structure to deal with their problems. In 1846 certain towns and cities passed their own Sanitary Acts, which made the council responsible for living conditions e.g. housing, sewers, water supply etc. Chadwick became the Head of the General Board of Health in 1848, which was created by the Public Health Act (passed the same year), whose introduction Chadwick had campaigned for. The General Board of Health supervised the smaller Boards of Health established in the towns and cities. The Boards of Health were responsible for the sewage, drainage and water supply of their area and had wide powers over issues relating to public health. However, the Public Health Act carried no compulsion to be abided to due to its’ permissive nature; this meant that changes in public health were not significantly undertaken by the authorities with Boards of Health.
In conclusion, the problems affecting public health in the period 1830-1848 are linked to one and other. A rapid increase in population, caused by the effects of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in bad housing conditions which led to poor hygiene and eventually leading to widespread disease. It was obvious from the information obtained by reports at this time that there was a significant need for social reform. Although the 1848 Public Health Act did little to improve living conditions it signified a major shift towards central government intervention in the support of social issues; an area it had previously considered to be outside its’ jurisdiction.
