E-Health Magazine Second Partial Mar. 2014 Mar. 2014 | Page 6

History

Health Issues during the Industrial Revolution
During the industrialization all the factories where in the urban part of the country and people observed that
they had better lives so the people from the rural side who dedicated their lives to crops started to move to
the urban part as well. The urban city couldn’t handle suddenly increasing their population by thousands of
people. They started to develop health issues caused by the awful working conditions and lack of resources
at that time. Everything was so fast they didn’t thought about their health.

Overpopulation:
At the time of industrialization two cities were moving into one and it was very crowded. People started to
lack resources like food, water and medicines. People including children were working a lot of hours and the
lack of food made them starve which caused health problems for all. They didn't have water for everyone so
they had bad hygiene, all of those problems couldn't be solved either because they were scared with
medicine as well.

Pollution:
The excess use of machinery and factories during the Industrial Revolution led to the development of many
environmental problems, including pollution. One of the ways in which the industrialization caused these
problems was by deforestation, factories used to cut trees to grow their factories thus endangering the
wildlife in the forests. The lack of trees also provoked the carbon emissions to stay in the air, therefore
causing air pollution. This affected the environment whereas “forests would help emit oxygen and refresh
the levels of healthy gases in the air” as stated in the Industrial Revolution Eco Issues article. The large
amount of industry contributed to the excessive amount of coal, smoke and cloth dyes that polluted the air
and water. With this big amount of pollution, the bad conditions of the working areas in the cities and the
lack of hygiene, many people started to come down with diseases causing the life expectancy to drop and
affecting the development of the industrialization.

Diseases:
One reason that there were health issues during this period was the lack of knowledge about hygiene,
sanitary care and more importantly lack of knowledge about what caused the diseases. Overpopulation
along with contamination of water sources caused outbreaks of cholera, typhus and typhoid. Smallpox reappeared, even after a vaccine was developed, the reason being that people moving to the cities were
generally unaware of the advances of medicine. Tuberculosis was one of the major killers, it attacked those
that were poorly fed and lived in damp and filthy homes.
Finally, although the industrial revolution brought many benefits to the development of the economy in many
countries and its colonies it also brought many problems to the people living at that time. The lack of
hygiene and the overpopulation caused many diseases that would later become plagues and even bigger
problems to the development of the industrialization in such countries.