Tuberculosis In Victorian England Essay

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Before the age of vaccines, antibiotics, and hygiene, there was a time of utter confusion and delay. Daily life threatened Earth’s inhabitants as diseases reigned over the merciless humans. Victorian England faced especially significant challenges as many different pandemics and epidemics swarmed over the industrial society all at once. These diseases shaped the Victorian England that we know today.

At this time, England was already experiencing many threats to hygiene. Throughout the poorer classes through the upper classes, the diseases of this time prevailed. For the impoverished individuals, many aspects of clustered, daily life exposed them to a variety of lethal pathogens. With the lack of income that they faced, there was a deficiency of necessary treatments that could have possibly counteracted these illnesses. The poorer class Englanders lived in poorly …show more content…

Tuberculosis is a highly contagious diseases caused by the tuberculosis bacterium. These bacterias collect in the upper respiratory tract, as well and is highly lethal. Most of the time, tuberculosis was not distinguished from other respiratory infections; all upper respiratory infections were classified and treated the same at the time. This meant that doctors assumed the same epidemiological pattern for all of these diseases, but tuberculosis, in fact, showed a different pattern. Unlike other infections like these, tuberculosis was not limited to only population-dense areas. This disease pointed out the many barriers to medicine at the time, which could not be overlooked to determine overall conclusions yet. For instance, today we have enough information about genetics and microbes that we can classify life into a taxonomical diagram, but back then, classifications like these were too general to conclude any data from. Tuberculosis showed Victorian England that there were many pieces of knowledge that they were