Chadwick's sanitary report

Edwin Chadwick was born in Manchester in 1800 and trained as a lawyer in London, where he turned to social reform. In 1832 he joined a royal commission on the Poor Laws, and his work fed into the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Cholera had reached Britain in 1831, and epidemics of influenza and typhoid followed in 1837 and 1838, so the government asked Chadwick for a new inquiry into sanitation. By 1841 close to half of Britain's population lived in towns.

At Chadwick's request, the Poor Law Commission had already surveyed the sanitary state of the poor in east London in 1838. The second inquiry was far wider. Assistant commissioners gathered returns from around the country, down to reports on housing in North Wales, and the result appeared in 1842 under Chadwick's name. He paid for the publication himself.

Descriptions of air, sewers, dung heaps, water and housing sat beside statistics in the report. It counted 43,000 new widows and 112,000 new orphans a year, and it found that the poor in places such as East London died on average 29 years younger than the wealthy. Chadwick compared the toll to a war that killed more people every year than any conflict Britain had fought, and he framed the cure as a matter of engineering, beginning with drainage.

In 1843, persuaded by the findings, the government appointed the Royal Commission on the Health of Towns, which examined the sanitary arrangements of 50 English towns. That commission's work produced the Public Health Act of 1848.