Sanitation and public health
Sewers, clean water and vaccination roughly double life expectancy.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 52 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Nineteenth-century cities were lethal — urban death rates exceeded birth rates and cities grew only by migration. Sewerage, filtered water supply, milk pasteurisation, housing regulation and compulsory vaccination change that decisively; Bazalgette's London sewers, built after the Great Stink of 1858, end cholera in the city. The gains from sanitation and nutrition exceed those from clinical medicine for most of this period.