Sanitation, Mid-19th Century

Nothing occupies a nation's mind with the subject of health like a general contagion. In the 1830s and the 1840s there were three massive waves of contagious disease: the first, from 1831 to 1833, included two influenza epidemics and the initial appearance of cholera; the second, from 1836 to 1842, encompassed major epidemics of influenza, typhus,typhoid, and cholera. As F. H. Garrison has observed, epidemic eruptions in the eighteenth century had been "more scattered and isolated" than theretofore; and in the early decades of the nineteenth century there had been a marked decline in such illnesses as diphtheria and influenza. Smallpox, the scourge of the eighteenth century, appeared to be controllable by the new practice of vaccination. Then, in the mid-twenties, England saw serious outbursts of smallpox and typhus, anticipating the pestilential turbulence of the next two decades. 

http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/health10.html - Raecelynn Besa