HIST 3D Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Calcium Chloride, Smallpox, Foodborne Illness
Urban disease: cholera and typhoid fever
● Pre-conditions
- Growth of cities, industries, migration, density
- Overseas empire: india transportation
- Sanitation
- Contagion and anti-contagion
● Cholera- new epidemic
- Cause and course
- Epidemiology
- From india
- European and American epidemics
- Threat of poor
● John snow and cholera
- Young doctor
- 1849, first ideas
- Broad st pump, 1854
- Two water companies
- Objections and vindications, 1866
● Typhoid fever
- Salmonella typhi d. Louis- intestinal flyer
- Clinical course
- epidemiology
● William budd and typhoid fever (1811-1885)
- Young physician
- Collecting cases
- Opposition and alliance with snow
- Prevention: chloride of line
● Using steam power to increase productivity (through steam engine, less human work)
- Industrialization often depended on power in one place-- factories
- Economic institutions got bigger
- Bring people to power, machines, places of work
- Massive migration into european cities
- People willing to put up with harsh conditions to maintain their jobs
- Transportation increased in speed, decreased in cost, and became a much
denser network to carry out transportation
- Ex: Canals, roads,
- Innovations powered by the steam engine (steamboats and steam powered
railways) → megacity
● British developed a new overseas empire in south Asia
- They were exposed to different kinds of diseases
- Empire depended upon movement, and with movement came the possibility for
disease
- First half of 19th century, sanitary state of individuals got worse, especially as
they moved into a city
- Density of population; people had to live much closer together
- Especially the poor; they had to live in crowded circumstances
- Density will worsen sanitation → sources of water and waste disposal
- In the country, finding clean water was not an issue; with an urban area, if you
sink a well, waste products surrounding it seep into the water table
● Diseases prominent in the area at the time
- Smallpox, measles, plague, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid
fever, malaria hn
- Epidemics would rise quickly within a short period of time
● Contagion theory
- Conceived in early 19th century
- Living close together, people come down with the same disease
- Includes epidemic diseases BUT they are not directly contagious diseases
- Modern: water or food borne disease & vector borne
- Tended to believe that it was not contagion going on; rather, the reason people
got sick was a complicated epidemic change where you started out with
environmental circumstance (i.e. weather, geography, urban vs rural, waste
products) which gave rise to miasma or emanations (everything in the air from
these causes)
- Miasma needed a trigger, called an epidemic influence that causes corruption in
the air
→ This is what causes the disease
- Epidemic influence is filtered through individual conditions such as inheritance,
temperament, habits
● Cholera
- Vibrio gets inside by some kind of fecal-oral route
- Goes into small intestines, penetrates into wall, creates toxin, changes properties
of lumin, and you start having water flow out of the rest of your body
- Rapid course;
- First symptoms are headache, no fever → painless, copeless diarrhea
- Intestines are pouring fluid out, cleans out fecal material, and left with rice-water
feces
- Not uncommon to have 15 to 20 quarts of liquid matter expelled
- Blood starts thickening, kidneys shut down, losing electrolytes affects nervous
system, can vary greatly in severity
- Untreated cholera has a 30-50% mortality rate
- Ingest it; either by drinking water or can attach to fresh vegetables, or can be
acquired by eating shellfish that comes from a shallow bay
- Originally from India
Document Summary
Using steam power to increase productivity (through steam engine, less human work) Industrialization often depended on power in one place-- factories. Bring people to power, machines, places of work. People willing to put up with harsh conditions to maintain their jobs. Transportation increased in speed, decreased in cost, and became a much denser network to carry out transportation. Innovations powered by the steam engine (steamboats and steam powered railways) megacity. British developed a new overseas empire in south asia. They were exposed to different kinds of diseases. Empire depended upon movement, and with movement came the possibility for disease. First half of 19th century, sanitary state of individuals got worse, especially as they moved into a city. Density of population; people had to live much closer together. Especially the poor; they had to live in crowded circumstances. Density will worsen sanitation sources of water and waste disposal.
