The 19th century saw great improvements in health and medicine - Do you agree?

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The 19th century saw great

Improvements in health and medicine.

Do you agree?

        Medicine is getting better through time as there were many discoveries such as the smallpox and Pasteur’s germ theory, but just because medicine was improving it doesn’t mean that health was improving. Health, hygiene and medicine are very important but in the 19th century health wasn’t that important as people didn’t know that pollution and germs caused infections and diseases.

        

I disagree that the 19th century saw improvements in health as the population kept on increasing and houses were built closer together, this caused people and places to become more crowded. Conditions in the countryside were becoming as bad as in the towns. Bad water supplies, inadequate drains, damp houses, over crowding, and indifference to rubbish all helped to spread disease. Diarrhoea, typhus and the dreaded typhoid and cholera sometimes ravaged cottages as severely as they did the slums of the city.

Towns were in very bad conditions as filth of every kind was scattered about or heaped up against the walls, pigs, cows and horses were lodged under the same roof of their owners. In Liverpool the average age of death was 35 for an upper class, and in the rural areas it was 52 in 1840. For the middle-class in Liverpool the average age were 22 and in rural areas 41. The third class average in Liverpool is 15 and in rural areas it was 38. This shows that in towns the death rates are higher than in the countryside as towns are filthier and over crowded. So health did not see great improvements.

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        Even if I disagree that the 19th century didn’t see many improvement in health, I do agree that the 19th century saw improvements in medicine. It started with the discovery of the smallpox vaccination. Edward Jenner discovered this discovery. People were given a small dose of the smallpox, some people died of this mild dose that they were given. Others became carriers of the disease and could pass it on to other people they came into contact. Therefore people refused the treatment. Edward Jenner was a doctor in Gloucestershire. Jenner was puzzled to find that many people refused the vaccination. Then he ...

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