Cholera

Cholera

Speech:

Cholera was the main illness in the industrial revolution. Many people caught it and hardly any survived. The Victorians thought this was caused by pollution when actually it was caused by unclean water.

In the industrial revolution people lived in terrible conditions. About 3 to 5 families lived in one small, cramped house with no electricity, toilets or running water. Some houses were built back to back with no windows on the back or backyards. The streets were no better than the houses. Most streets had a sewage system running down the middle. They used water pumps that were at the end of streets and normally the whole town shared it. Some families even dumped their waste out of the window to sit there in the streets and rot.

With the sewer down the middle of the street and horrible waste pilled high, no wonder people in the industrial revolution caught cholera!

Cholera is a killer disease that is caused by dirty water. Sometimes, the pipes carrying the water to the pumps got cracked or broke and the sewage flowed along with the water. Then the people that lived in that area pumped out the water for themselves and their families to drink. Imagine taking home water with human waste mixed in with it! Wouldn’t that make you feel sick?

Once people have cholera, they only have a few days to live unless they can find a cure. The symptoms of Cholera are: dioreha, constantly being sick, stomach aches, head aches and sweating. There were not many doctors back then so no one had a cure and if you were lucky enough to find a doctor, they might not be qualified enough or you might have to pay.

Because there were not many doctors that meant that no one new what had caused the disease. The Victorians thought that cholera was caused by bad smells and dirty air. Sir Edwin Chadwick, a lawyer from Longsight in Manchester, worked for the government. He was secretary of an investigation on ‘Poor Law’. He divided the county into groups and gave them all a...