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 image one without being led to a nonher. A.S. Wohl sums it up when he states It is rather common of modern medical opinion that nutrition plays a crucial single-valued function in the bodys ability to resist unhealthiness and the experience of the World Health Organization indicates that where sanitary conditions are rudimentary and disease is endemic (that is, where nineteenth-century conditions prevail, so to speak) diet may be the crucial factor in transmission (Wohl 56). However, at that place was often a vicious cycle at fetch in these trying times and it is difficult to point to the root causes of about of the contagion that infected people. Also there were various philosophies, some not as instructive as others, being practiced in the proterozoic part of the nineteenth century that tried to explain sanitation problems and poverty. W hen send word see how pervasive this problem was as it made its way into a good deal of the literature at the time. Its representation was rather grim. Works such as Charles Dickenss Oliver Twist and Elizabeth Gaskells Mary Barton represent the harsh reality of these conditions. While more of the investigation into the sanitary conditions of the times focused on the working classes, disease and unforesightful 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 progeny of some sort of moral failing. Graham Benton puts his digit on this view rather succinctly in his piece which latterly appeared in the Dickens Quarterly And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and contagious disease In Bleak House. Benton suggests that although contagious disease refuses to recognize boundaries of class, it has become line up with the disenfranchised and disavowed segments of society, and, more significantly, disease became emblematic of other unrelated just equally horrific social ills (69). Whatever the motivations to end the plight of contagion and unsanitary conditions might have been at the time it is fair to opine that when the spread 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 deplete disposal procedures can be seen as a direct result of fever and epidemic it is important first to look at the dietetical practices of the working classes which would greatly contribute to their squalid living conditions.