Health and Sanitation in Victorian London :: European Europe History

Health and Sanitation in Victorian London Diet, Health, and Sanitation in Victorian England are so interrelated that it is difficult to examine angiotensin converting enzyme without being led to another. A.S. Wohl sums it up when he states It is rather commonplace of raw medical opinion that nutrition plays a crucial role in the bodys ability to resist disease and the experience of the World Health boldness indicates that where sanitary conditions are rudimentary and disease is endemic (that is, where nineteenth-century conditions prevail, so to speak) nutrition may be the crucial factor in infection (Wohl 56). However, in that respect was a good deal a vicious cycle at work in these trying times and it is difficult to point to the root causes of some of the transmittal that infected people. Also there were various philosophies, some not as instructive as others, being practiced in the early case of the nineteenth century that tried to explain sanitation problems and poverty . When can give ear how pervasive this problem was as it made its way into much of the lit at the time. Its representation was rather grim. Works such as Charles Dickenss Oliver bow and Elizabeth Gaskells Mary Barton represent the harsh reality of these conditions. While much of the investigation into the sanitary conditions of the times focused on the functional classes, disease and pitiable sanitation also found their way into the higher classes of society. However, there often remained the prevailing stigma that a dirty body and poor sanitation was the result of some sort of moral failing. Graham Benton puts his finger on this view rather succinctly in his piece which recently appeared in the Dickens Quarterly And Dying Thus Around Us all Day Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and Contagion In Bleak House. Benton suggests that although contagious disease refuses to recognize boundaries of class, it has become aligned with the disf ranchised and disavowed segments of society, and, more significantly, disease became emblematic of other unrelated but every bit horrific social ills (69). Whatever the motivations to end the plight of contagion and insanitary conditions might have been at the time it is fair to say that when the airing of disease crossed the invisible boundaries of class that people were spurred into action, albeit not as quickly as they should have. While poor drainage and waste inclination procedures can be seen as a direct result of feverishness and epidemic it is important first to look at the dietary practices of the working classes which would greatly contribute to their squalid living conditions.