Taming The City

1. Taming The City

2. Industry and Growth of Cities • Newly industrialized towns and cities were awful places for people to live. • Bad housing and lack of sanitation. • Cities were congested, dirty, and unhealthy. • More people died each year than were born. • Each town/city was using each scrap of the land to the fullest extent. • Houses • They were narrow • No front or backyards • Very overcrowded

3. Factors Leading to the Awful Conditions • Drainage systems • Open drains and sewers flowed down the middle of unpaved streets • No form of transportation • The government in Great Britain was slow to provide sanitary facilities. • Parks and open areas were almost non existent. • Most responsible of all was the sad legacy of rural housing conditions in preindustrial society.

4. Public Health Revolution • Edwin Chadwick • He was a Benthamite. • Became convinced that disease and death cause poverty. • Believed that disease could be prevented by cleaning up the urban environment. • Solutions to the sanitary problems. • Chadwick believed that the stinking excrement could be carried off by water through sewers. -collected detailed reports from the local Poor Law officials, and the reports eventually became Great Britain’s first public health law.

5. Bacterial Revolution • Chadwick was handicapped by the miasmatic theory of disease • belief that people contract disease when they breathe the bad odor of decay and putrefying excrement. • Pubic health officials and doctors suggested that contagion was spread through filth and not caused by it. • Louis Pasteur • A French chemist who developed the germ theory. • Found out that fermentation depended on the growth of living organisms and these organisms could be killed by heating the beverage.

6. Bacterial Revolution Cont. • This idea of heating the beverage was known as pasteurization. • It helped improve the environment of hospitals and surgery. • Joseph Lister, an English surgeon, reasoned that a chemical disinfectant applied to a wound dressing would destroy the bacteria in the air. • German surgeons developed sterilizing everything like hands, instrument, operating room. • Saved many lives

7. Urban Planning and Public Transportation • Napoleon III (r. 1848-1870) • Believed repairing Paris would provide employment and living condition. • George Haussmann • In charge of Paris him and Napoleon III found a way to transform Paris in twenty years. • Created boulevard, large parks, and train stations. • Those creation transformed Paris completely. • Spreads throughout Europe. • Transportation • 1870s private companies operated horse drawn street cars

8. Urban Planning and Public Transport Cont. • 1890s • Adopted electric street cars from Americans. • European workers, shoppers, and schoolchildren used the electric street car. • By 1910 6.7 billion people were riding the electric street cars. • With this transportation it helped expand the overcrowded cities and became less congested.