Public Health was becoming a strain in Industrial Britain because the population was growing fast and conditions were not appropriate for so many. The number of people in the country had grown from 7 millions in 1781, and had climbed to over 13 millions by 1830.
Life expectancy had gone up yet people were more susceptible to decease and illness. However this danger was confined more so to class because the chances of catching decease were dependant on the area where you lived and the diet you ate. Industrialisation had caused urbanisation; this was where many of the workers and paupers lived. Conditions were overcrowded and very unsanitary, the number of deceases you could catch were high. These included smallpox, typhoid, measles, tuberculosis and the main problem during the mid 19th Century, cholera. Previous to the 1848 Public Health act there were no health provisions, all that existed were laws allowing quarantine, and vaccinations of smallpox. This meant when there was an outbreak it would quickly spread through the towns, the middle and upper classes were safer because they lived on the edges of these. And those that did live in towns such as merchants and manufacturers often lived in villas surrounded by gardens. A contemporary looking at Manchester described it as “where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to cross”
. In many ways decease acted as a form of “social murder”
. When outbreaks spread Poor Law was looked to for relief, this caused a large drain on the system and Edwin Chadwick saw that a new body would have to be empowered to deal with health as a separate problem. It was up to “Chadwick to build the Public Health reform movement on the assertion that sickness resulting from unsanitary environments was a major charge on the Poor Law expenditure”.
The old ways had to be changed as cholera outbreaks were killing people fast and the existing system could not deal with it. If society was to advance and the economy continue strongly the country could not have its workforce savaged in such a way, to do this would take a great deal of work especially when nothing had existed before.
