Who Played the More Important Role in Improving Public Health Edwin Chadwick or Aneurin Bevan?

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Edwin Chadwick was very important in improving public health in towns in the nineteenth century. To begin with, he wrote the Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population in 1842 which gave details of the public health problems of the time, and showed how dirty conditions led to the rich paying higher taxes, because the poor were too sick to work. He made recommendations about how public health could be improved, that were later included in the first Public health Act which was passed in 1848. This Act created a Board of Health, of which Chadwick was a member, to encourage local authorities to improve conditions. Therefore, his work was extremely important because it led to the first Public health Act. However, the first Public health Act didn’t have a lot of impact, and it was only passed at that time because there had been a cholera epidemic. The government didn’t really want to force local authorities to make improvements because it cost a lot of money. It wasn’t until 1875, after the link had been made between dirt and disease, that a second Public health Act was passed which forced local authorities to improve conditions. This was passed partly because working class men had the vote. This convinced MPs they had to do something to improve their conditions in order to gain the votes they needed to get elected. Overall, although Chadwick’s work took a very long time to improve public health, it did form the basis of the reforms that the government pushed through. I don’t think these would have become enforcable by law if attitudes hadn’t changed thanks to more people having the vote and the discovery of germ theory. Chadwick could not have done it on his own; but I think the work he did was very important. The work of Aneurin Bevan was really important in launching the NHS in 1948, because he was Minister for Health and so it

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