Healthcare, Hygiene and Cleaning Milestones
Marc Ferguson, International Business Development Manager for Kaivac, looks at the role cleaning and hygiene has in improving quality of life.
Sometimes it takes a look back to see just how far the UK has come in protecting the health of its citizens. Back in the Victorian era, a middle/upper-class businessman could expect to live, on average, to 45 years of age. Workers and labourers working in factories often died in their late-20s and children were considered lucky if they survived their fifth birthday.
A big concern in those days was ‘miasma’, or bad air. The air in London, especially in the poorer districts, often had a foul odour. It was also in these areas where life expectancies were the shortest.
The air in the prosperous suburbs, on the other hand, did not have foul odours, and this is where people lived the longest.
It is because of this that many doctors and public health officials of the day believed that disease was caused by foul
smelling air. They did not necessarily look into why the air smelled or what was in the air, just that it smelled.
Florence Nightingale, England's most famous nurse, was a firm believer in the ‘miasma theory’. Therefore, she insisted that hospitals have plenty of fresh air and, just as important, encouraged more effective cleaning to help eradicate foul odours.
She became one of the first people in the world to realise there was a connection between cleaning and health, at least in hospitals. During the Crimean Wars, from 1853 to 1856, she noticed that more soldiers were dying from infections – typically acquired while in a medical setting – than from their wounds on the battleground.
Addressing this, the British Library concluded: “A [nurse as well as a] talented mathematician, Nightingale spent the late 1850s proving statistically that a concentration
48 | HEALTHCARE HYGIENE
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