Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick Britain 1800–1854

In 1998, the British Medical Journal commemorated the 150th anniversary of the first Great Public Health Act.Christopher Hamlin was among the authors who reflected upon the achievements and contemporary relevance of the legacy of Edwin Chadwick and his contemporaries.In this lively and readable book, Hamlin develops the idea that public health in Britain in the first half of the 19th century involved two transforming questions.Firstly, how broad public health was to be and how the 'moral economy of medicine was to mesh with the political economy of industrial capitalism?'The second is how Chadwick, in the name of efficiency and science, was able to equate in the public mind sanitation and sanitary works with the attainment of political stability and social justice.Chadwick was the central actor in the sanitary movement in the turbulent 1840s.His Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, argued that the primary cause of pauperism and misery was not poverty or rampant capitalism, but filth.To Chadwick, the water queue, the dung heap and the cesspool were the causes of moral decline, fever and death.His arguments were a counterpoint to the more radical visions of William Cobbett and the Chartists.Frederich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and the Communist Manifesto in 1848.Work, wages and food were rejected as remedies for pauperism in favor of watering and sewering.The notion that poverty itself was the cause of illness was, for Chadwick, unthinkable.He resented the inclusion by William Farr of the category 'starvation' in the bills of mortality, arguing that it was impossible for a person to starve to death in London.To admit this would be to admit to a failure-not just of his sanitary agenda, but of his whole program of utilitarian reform.As a young barrister, Chadwick became the private secretary to Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher.After Bentham's death he became a civil servant and architect of some of the most far-reaching legislative reform in the early Victorian period.