Zur Rezeption von Franz Kafka und Samuel Beckett in Rumänien

Public Health While Factory and Mine legislation was essential to addressing the terrible exploitation and working conditions faced by the industrial working class and educational reform was essential to improving their children’s opportunities, the most urgent problem that required State intervention was public health. Industrial cities in nineteenth century Britain were deadly. The population of England, Wales and Scotland had doubled in the first half of the nineteenth century, from 10.5 to 20.8 million. Much of this increase was concentrated in the growing industrial cities. Between 1801 and 1851 the population of Glasgow grew from 77,000 to 357,000; Liverpool, 82,000 to 376,000; Manchester, 75,000 to 303,000; and Bradford, 13,000 to 104,000. Even in an age of enlightened and well-regulated urban planning these increases would have been difficult to manage, in the early nineteenth century they resulted in appalling overcrowding, shoddy housing, inadequate sanitation, disease and terrifying mortality figures, especially for infants and children. In 1840, one in three children died before the age of five. Cholera reached epidemic proportions in these industrial cities, with the outbreak that began in 1831 killing 21,000 people in England and Wales, 9,000 in Scotland and 20,000 in Ireland. In 1848-9 cholera was responsible for 2,000 deaths a week in London alone and over 90,000 deaths overall. Added to these outbreaks were the more endemic problems of typhoid, tuberculosis, measles and even diarrhoea, all deadly and all caused by contaminated water and inadequate sewage disposal. Unsatisfactory arrangements for burials added to the problem, with corpses often kept in house for a week or more while families struggled to raise the money for a funeral. The Public Health Crisis and Edwin Chadwick’s Report The public health crisis, as recorded in the rising national death rate, which rose from 19 per thousand in 1831 to 25.1 per thousand in 1849, was highlighted in Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitation Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (July 1842). The statistics Chadwick produced on life expectancy shocked the public. Whereas a lawyer in a rural county like Rutland could expect to live to 52, a labourer in Manchester could expect to live, on average, to 17. In Liverpool the average life expectancy was 15. Only the government had the resources to tackle such a challenge. Chadwick’s Report made a number of recommendations, including providing all houses with piped water for drinking and flushing away sewage. For the Victorian State, unused to making such interventions and alarmed by the enormous cost this entailed, progress in implementing Chadwick’s recommendations was slow and uneven, leaving local authorities to undertake remedial steps themselves in the first instance. Key legislative milestones included: The Public Health Act 1848 This Act gave local authorities the power to establish Boards of Health to undertake large scale water and sewage works, among other pressing tasks. However, it did not compel them to do so, which resulted in only 182 Boards being established by 1854 covering 2 in 18 million of the population. The Sanitation Act 1866 Recognising the crucial failure of the 1848 Act, the 1866 Act compelled local authorities to take steps to improve conditions. The Public Health Act 1872 This Act established Health Authority districts for England and Wales, each to have its own Medical Officer and staff, but it failed to make clear what their duties were. This oversight was addressed with The Public Health Act 1875. This detailed the compulsory responsibilities of local authorities, including ensuring the adequate supply of water, drainage and sewage disposal, the regulation of ‘offensive’ trades which contributed to the spread of disease and the confiscation and destroying of contaminated food. Attempts were also made to deal with the problem of slum housing, first by The Artisans’ Dwellings Act 1875 which gave local authorities the power, if not the direct instruction, to buy up, demolish and replace unhealthy slum housing; and second by The Housing of the Working Classes Acts of 1890 and 1900, which finally compelled them to do so. All of these Acts played a part but of equal importance in addressing the public health crisis were non-State directed medical advances (such as the introduction of chloroform, the advancement of the germ theory of disease and improvements in the standards of medical training) and engineering feats like the Longdendale waterworks, which cost the staggering sum of £750,000 and took ten years to complete but eventually provided Manchester with thirty million gallons of clean water a day. The death rate remained stubbornly high in 1870 at 24 per thousand but did slowly drop to reach 18 per thousand in 1901, but late Victorian cities remained dirty and overcrowded places to live and vulnerable to outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and smallpox. The scale of the task still at hand was made particularly evident in Charles Booth’s investigations of poverty in London between 1889 and 1903. Whitechapel detail from Charles Booth’s Poverty Map (black areas marking the highest levels of deprivation). You can explore Booth’s London with this interacti ve map from the LSE.