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 examine one without being led to another. A.S. Wohl sums it up when he states It is rather commonplace of modern medical opinion that nutrition plays a crucial role in the bodys ability to resist disease and the experience of the World Health Organization indicates that where sanitary conditions are rudimentary and disease is endemical (that is, where nineteenth-century conditions prevail, so to speak) diet may be the crucial factor in infection (Wohl 56). However, there was often a vicious cycle at body of work in these trying times and it is difficult to point to the root causes of some of the contagion that infected people. Also there were various philosophies, some not as instructive as others, being practiced in the early part of the nineteenth century that tried to explain sanitation problems and poverty. When can see how permeative this prob lem was as it made its way into much of the literature at the time. Its containation was rather grim. Works such as Charles Dickenss Oliver Twist and Elizabeth Gaskells Mary Barton represent the harsh reality of these conditions. While much of the investigation into the sanitary conditions of the times focused on the working classes, disease and poor sanitation also entrap their way into the higher classes of society. However, there often remained the prevailing stigma that a dirty body and poor sanitation was the result of some sort of clean failing. Graham Benton puts his finger on this view rather succinctly in his piece which recently appeared in the Dickens Quarterly And Dying Thus or so Us Every Day Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and Contagion In Bleak House. Benton suggests that although contagious disease refuses to recognize boundaries of class, it has become align with the disenfranchised and disavowed segments of society , and, more significantly, disease became emblematic of other unrelated but equally horrific social ills (69). Whatever the motivations to end the plight of contagion and unhealthful conditions might have been at the time it is fair to say that when the spread of disease crossed the invisible boundaries of class that people were spurred into action, albeit not as promptly as they should have. While poor drainage and waste disposal procedures can be seen as a direct result of fever and epidemic it is of the essence(p) first to look at the dietary practices of the working classes which would greatly contribute to their squalid living conditions.