Improvements in Public Health Flashcards
All 15 cards in this deck
What did the Public Health Act of 1875 make compulsory?
Local councils had to provide clean water and deal with sewage and rubbish.
Why was the 1875 Public Health Act significant for prevention?
It showed central government taking responsibility for public health nationwide, so policies could be enforced everywhere.
What did John Snow prove in the 1854 cholera outbreak in London?
That cholera was water-borne, spread by infected water, not by miasma.
What happened when the handle of the Broad Street pump was removed in 1854?
No more cases came from the pump, and that local outbreak ended (it was already slowing).
Who was Joseph Bazalgette?
The engineer appointed to build London's new sewer system, which drastically reduced cholera epidemics.
True or false? Snow's findings were accepted immediately and cholera prevention changed at once.
False. Without Germ Theory to explain the link, many still blamed miasma, and government action such as the new sewers came later.
How did John Snow find the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho?
He marked every cholera death on a street map and saw that they clustered around the Broad Street water pump.
What was later found to have contaminated the Broad Street pump?
Sewage seeping into its well from a cesspool only a few feet away.
Why did the 1848 Public Health Act do little to prevent cholera?
It was mostly voluntary: towns could set up local boards of health to improve water and drains, but most were not forced to, so few did.
What did Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population (1842) argue?
That filthy living conditions caused disease, and that clean water, drainage and rubbish removal would make the poor healthier and cut the cost of poor relief.
Give two public health problems in industrial towns in the early nineteenth century.
Overcrowded back-to-back housing and no clean water supply; sewage from cesspits often leaked into the water people drank.
What was laissez-faire?
The belief that government should not interfere in people's lives or the economy; it held back public health reform in the nineteenth century.
What was the Great Stink of 1858?
The hot summer when the sewage-filled Thames smelled so badly that MPs could barely work in Parliament; it persuaded government to fund Bazalgette's new London sewers.
Why were politicians more willing to pass the 1875 Public Health Act than earlier laws?
The Second Reform Act of 1867 gave many working-class men in towns the vote, so parties competed for their support by promising healthier living conditions.
When did cholera first reach Britain?
In 1831, arriving at the port of Sunderland. Later epidemics followed in 1848–49, 1853–54 and 1866.