A public health petition. The 1848 Act and Middleton, a township in Lancashire.

THE industrial revolution, which consisted in the invention and utilization of machinery driven first by water and later by steam power, resulted in the employment of many workers in factories and workshops and led to the destruction of the domestic industries which were spread throughout the land. The textile industry, after that of agriculture the most important in the country, was the one chiefly affected prior to I830. The manufacture of textiles was transferred to the sources of power, towns grew up without plan, houses were built without supervision or regulation, great masses ofpeople gathered together without regard to health, decency or comfort, and soil, air and water were polluted without restriction. The rural-urban population movement was rapid and continuous; the population of England and Wales increased by 47 per cent between i Boi and I83I and the rural labourer, who numbered two to every one town workman in 1790, only numbered one to every two of the latter in I831. The resultant evils, however, caused a reaction; the humanitarian movement gained impetus and, among other things, attacked the conditions that caused ill-health to be the common lot and which led to one in every thirty persons in the towns dying each year. Fear, however, was the more potent spur; disease is no respecter ofpersons and as the well-to-do were endangered by the conditions of the poor, the repeated visitations of cholera and other diseases were valuable auxiliaries on the side of reform.. In I848 the first Public Health Act was passed: the Act created a General Board of Health which had powers to call into service local boards of health either on petition by the ratepayers or compulsorily when the death rate exceeded 23 per i,ooo population. To secure sound public health two important conditions require to be fulfilled: there must be a widespread desire among all classes to reduce sickness and disease and there must be knowledge furnished by science and technology. At the time of the first Reform Act some of the problems had come to be recognized but, though the will to apply them was strong, the machinery ofgovernment through which action could be taken was lacking. This was partially remedied by the Public Health Act (1848). In the years that followed, many towns did petition the General Board of Health; and this annotated report, of a superintendent-inspector of the General Board of Health, records the efforts of one small textile town to bring some measure oforder into its chaos. But the report has an additional importance for it refers to that period and phase in the conquest of disease which preceded the gradual ascendency of medical science and technology. The details of the 384