Woodhouse Grove School, a school for boys planning to go on to be Methodist ministers, was considered to be "a model of its kind" (Barker 122). While Eton and the other public schools were the schools of choice for those who could afford them,…
The Thames was not the only river that was affected by pollution, and since smaller towns and rivers were not as carefully scrutinized, poor water quality could go unaddressed for a much longer time than would be tolerated in a larger city. Anthony…
How was it, one might ask, that if there was a cholera epidemic throughout the whole country, John Snow was able to stop the epidemic in Soho merely by limiting it to a single pump? Another question: Most people didn't drink directly from the Thames.…
One generally associates the Thames with London, however a look at the map reveals that the river covers a much longer distance. By the time the Thames had reached London, it had passed through several large cities, a few of which I have marked on…
The Thames was supplied by several smaller rivers, such as the Cherwell and the Lea. This means every city on the river was affected by the pollution of the city that came before it on the stream, and every tributary carried the water of other…
Leicester was the site of particularly vehement resistance to the state mandated smallpox vaccination in 1853 (Wohl 133). The people of Leicester had already developed the "Leicester Method" of managing small pox, which involved disinfecting…
A curious example of local resistance to health reforms took place in Leeds during a severe outbreak of cholera in 1849. The residents ignored "calls to clean up the area and instead went and stood outside the local alkali factory for days on end"…
In my introduction, I used Islington as an example of what the implementation of the health reforms looked like on a local level primarily because Gerry Kearns's case study of the North London parish was such a widely-cited and well-recognized…
If Woodhouse Grove represented the best of the charity schools, Drouet's Orphanage represented the worst. Drouet's was the type of place where children who had no one to look after them eded up: a workhouse orphanage. Charles Dickens wrote critically…
The typhus epidemic at Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School is the incident on which the Lowood School epidemic in Jane Eyre is widely considered to be based. At Cowan Bridge, an evangelical school under the care of the reverend William Carus…