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  • 2023-01-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Did London Times Editorialize Against Being 'Bullied into Health' in 1800s? (en)
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  • As if to remind us that the extreme politicization of public health issues is not unique to the 21st century, excerpts from a 170-year-old editorial in the London Times railing against being bullied into health by an autocratic government agency found an enthusiastic new audience on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This viral quote comprises a few sentences culled from a lengthy opinion piece in the Aug. 1, 1854, edition of the Times discussing the Public Health Act of 1848 and public sanitation reforms enacted by Edwin Chadwick, a commissioner of the General Board of Health, in the wake of a major cholera epidemic: As the excerpt suggests, the Times was not a fan of the Public Health Act, public sanitation reforms, or Chadwick. Its editors took the position that the central government had no business bullying the public into health (note that the word bombailiff, or bumbailiff, was a derisive term for someone who hunts down and arrests debtors). Here is a longer excerpt from that 1854 editorial, which celebrates the dissolution and reconstitution of the Board of Health (Chadwick was to be replaced): Chadwick had been the author of a massive, self-funded study published in 1842 called Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. According to a profile of Chadwick on the website of The Health Foundation, a private U.K. health reform organization, he had pushed for nationwide sanitary infrastructure updates: The article cites the Times editorial as evidence of the public's antipathy to high levels of intervention in public health matters. Moreover, Chadwick's challenging personality and strong support of centralised administration and government intervention made him many enemies in Parliament. There was also a general consensus that the Public Health Act and Board of Health had largely failed in their mission to effect positive change, though not everyone agreed that it was because the plan relied too much on centralized power. According to today's U.K. Parliament website, its main limitation was that it wasn't centralized enough: With the subsequent passage of the Public Health Act of 1875, Parliament sought to correct the faults of the earlier legislation, in part by making local councils responsible for health and sanitation. (en)
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