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Public Health in Victorian Leeds

Public Health in Victorian Leeds

Many Industrial towns had problems during the Industrial Revolution. The conditions in leeds are well documented, this ‘inquiry into the state and condition of Leeds’ by Dr. Robert Baker provides some evidence that can be used to compare conditions in Bradford with those found elsewhere.

Things to consider:

  1. What are the similarities and differences between conditions in Leeds and Bradford?
  2. Is this report typical of conditions in British cities at the time?
  3. What was done about these conditions?

From An Inquiry into the State and Condition of Leeds, Robert Baker, 1842

Courts and Cul-de-sacs exist everywhere … In one cul-de-sac in Leeds there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house. The name of this place is Boot and Shoe Yard, from whence the commissioners removed, in the days of Cholera, 75 cartloads of manure which had been untouched for years.
For the most part these houses are built back-to-back. … A house of this description will contain a cellar, a house and chamber …
To build the largest number of cottages on the smallest possible space seems to have been the original view of the speculators. Thus neighbourhoods have arisen in which there is neither water nor privies.

Public Health in the Industrial Revolution

Impact of new machines – Workhouses in Bradford and Leeds – Typhoid outbreaks 1830 – 1836 – Cholera, 1831 Outbreak – Poor Law Commission [1834, Report 1837] – Poor Law Commission 1835 – Bradford Woolcombers Report, 1837 – Report on the conditions of workers in Leeds, 1842 – Report on the sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes, Chadwick 1842 – Health of Towns Association, 1844 – Health in Bradford in the mid 1840’s – Health in Manchester, 1844 – Public Health Act, 1848 – Working Conditions in Bradford, 1850 – Census figures: UK Population statistics 1831 – 1851 – John Snow’s work on Cholera, 1854 – Nightingale School of Nursing – Bradford Sewage Works, 1862 – Louis Pasteur: Germ Theory, 1865 – Second Reform Act [External] – Royal Sanitary Commission, 1869 – The Public Health Act, 1872 [External] – Public Health Act, 1875 [External] – Artizans and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act, 1875 [External] – Tuberculosis Germ identified by Robert Koch, 1882 – Cholera Germ identified, 1883 – Health in Bradford, Margaret McMillan’s Report, 1890 – Report into the health of Children in Bradford, 1907 – Timeline of Public Health over time – Medicine and Treatments c1350-2018 – Themes in Medical History

Medicine Through time

Resources for Medicine Through Time – Prehistoric Medicine – Ancient Egyptian Medicine – Ancient Greek Medicine – Medicine in the Roman Empire – Medieval Medicine – Renaissance Medicine – Public Health in the Industrial Revolution – Fight against infectious disease – Modern Medicine