Unit 12 P2, M1

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Unit 12: Public health – P2 and M1 19th century: During the ninetieth century, in 1834, the poor law amendment act was introduced. Most people welcomed this act as they thought that it would take poor people and beggars off of the street, encourage poor people to work to support themselves and reduce the cost of looking after the poor. This act would ensure that poor people worked in workhouses and in return they would be clothed and fed. Children who worked in the workhouse would receive some kind of schooling. This would affect people who were poor or had no income from working. During the nineteenth century the first national public health act was introduced in 1848. This act was made by Edwick Charwin who was convinced that if the health of the population was improved this would mean that we would have to spend less money on “poor relief”. This act made sure that there would be an improvement in drainage and provision of sewers, that rubbish would be removed from houses streets and roads, to provide people with clean drinking water and to have a medical officer for each town. This would affect everyone who lived in that particular town. Also in the nineteenth century John Snow was interested in how cholera was spreading through drinking water. When he made this observation he discovered that people who had drunk water provided by the same water company were more likely to catch the disease than other people who drank water from a different company. He then plotted all of known cases of cholera onto a map and discovered that most of the people who fell ill were getting water from the same pump. This was because the water in the pump was contaminated from sewage from the river Thames. Because of his investigation he stopped allowing people to collect water from that particular pump and the outbreak stopped. The benefits of this was that less people had
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