Health In The Victorian Era Essay Research

Health In The Victorian Era Essay, Research Paper

During the Victorian Era there were massive waves of contagious disease. The first was from 1831 to 1833, which included two influenza epidemics and the initial appearance of cholera. The second was from 1836 to 1842, which encompassed major epidemics of influenza, typhus, typhoid and cholera.

The first outbreak of Asiatic cholera in Britain was at Sunderland on the Durham coast during the autumn of 1831. From there the disease made its way northward into Scotland and southward toward London. From its point of origin Bengal it had taken five years for the disease to cross Europe. Whine it finally reached Durham, British doctors were well aware of its nature but not of its cause.

The progress of the illness in a cholera victim was frightening. Major symptoms included diarrhea that increased in intensity and became accompanied by painful retching, thirst and dehydration, severe pain in the limbs, stomach, and abdominal muscles, a change in skin hue to a sort of bluish-gray. This illness terrified doctors as well as ordinary citizens.

Cholera subsided as enigmatically as it had flourished, but in the meantime another illness took its place. Following a particularly rainy spring, Britain was visited by the first of eight serious influenza epidemics within a period of sixteen years. In those days the disease was often fatal, and even when it did not kill, it left its victims weakened in their defenses against other diseases. Burials in London doubled during the first week of the 1833 outbreak. In one two-week period they quadrupled. While cholera was found to have spread through water effecting mainly the poorer neighborhoods, influenza was limited by no economic or geographic boundaries. Large numbers of public officials died from it, as did many theater people.

At that time the term fever encompassed a number of different diseases including cholera and influenza. In the 1830 s the new fever , typhus, was isolated. During its worst outbreak, in 1837-38, most of the deaths from the fever in London were attributed to typhus, and new cases averaged about sixteen thousand in England throughout each of the next four years. This coincided with one of the worst smallpox epidemics which killed tens of thousands, mainly infants and children. Scarlet fever, which was referred to in those days as scarlatina, was responsible for nearly twenty thousand deaths in 1840 alone.

In the years between 1842 and 1846, there was a considerable decline in epidemics. However, in 1846, a hot and dry summer was followed by a serious outbreak of typhoid in the fall of that year. Enteric fever, as it was then called, is a water-borne disease like cholera and tends to flourish when people are not particular about the source of their drinking water. That same year, as the potato famine struck Ireland, a virulent form of typhus appeared, affecting large numbers of even well to do families. As Irish workers moved to cities like Liverpool and Glasglow the Irish fever moved with them. By 847 the contagion, not all connected with immigration, had spread throughout England and Wales. It accounted for over thirty thousand deaths. As had happened earlier, typhus appeared simultaneously with a severe influenza epidemic. There was also widespread dysentery, and as if this was not enough, cholera returned in the autumn of 1848. It assailed especially those parts of the island hardest hit by typhus and left about as many dead as it had in 1831.

Diseases like cholera, typhoid, and influenza were more or less endemic at the time, erupting into epidemics when the right climatic conditions coincided with periods of economic distress. The frequency of concurrent epidemics gave rise to the belief that one sort of disease brought on another, and it was widely believed that influenza was an early stage of cholera. There were other contagions that yearly killed thousands without becoming epidemic. Taken together, measles and hooping cough accounted for fifty thousand deaths in England and Wales between 1838 and 1840. About one quarter of all deaths during this general period have been attributed to tuberculosis and consumption.

Generally throughout the 1830 s and 1840 s trade was off and food prices were high. The poorer classes, being underfed, were less resistant to contagion. Also, during the more catastrophic years the weather was extremely variable, with heavy rains following prolonged droughts. Population, especially in the Midlands and in some seaport cities and towns, was growing rapidly without a concurrent expansion in new housing. Crowding contributed to the relatively fast spread of disease in these places. The Registrar General reported in 1841 that while mean life expectancy was forty-five years, it was only thirty-seven in London and twenty-six in Liverpool. The average age of laborers, mechanics, and servants at times of death was only fifteen. Mortality figures for crowded districts like Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and Bermondsey were typically twice as high as those for middle-class areas of London.

These kinds of statistics made the people of Britain aware of the magnitude of diseases in their own time and it also served as effective weapons for sanitary reformers when they brought their case before Parliament. Two reports by the Poor Law Commission in 1838, one by Dr. Southwood Smith and the oth