Public health problems caused by the Industrial Revolution (3.1)

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The impact of a rising, mobile population

The death rate fell due to:

  • smallpox vaccine
  • better quality food
  • soap was cheap and readily available
  • cotton cloth was cheap and easy to buy for people to wash

The brith rate rose because:

  • more people survived into their twenties and thirties to have babies

The marriage rate rose because:

  • easier for men and women agricultural labourers to begin life together on their own and so they married earlier
  • industrial workers could marry as soon as they had a job
  • earlier marriages, in the days before contraception, meant more babies
  • in 1801, 33% of the population lived in towns
  • this increased to 50% in 1851 and 72% in 1891
  • in manchester in the 1840s, 57% of babies died before their fifth birthday
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The imapct on people's living conditions

  • Filth diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria, TB, scarlet fever and cholera became more common.
  • Other 19th century killers, such as measles and whooping cough, became endemic
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Housing

  • agricultural labourers had lived in conditions that were frequently no better than those of the animals they tended
  • widespread overcrowding
  • urban communities repsonded first by using up and adapting exisitng 'vacant' living space and by building new dwellings
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Sanitation

  • housing lacked drainage, sewerage and a regular water supply
  • lavatories were outside and emptied into cesspits and cleaned out by night-soil men
  • water in short supply and expensive
  • controlled by vested interests in thr form of private water companies
  • poorer areas of town had standpipes where they queued with buckets to buy what they could afford when the water company turned on the supply
  • the middle classes had water piped to their houses
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