ABSTRACT
There was a wide-ranging, substantial and often violent reaction to the immediate impact of cholera. Long-term responses were not so clear. Men like Sir John Simon and Charles Creighton looked back at 1832 and saw obvious lessons in the epidemic. Cholera had demonstrated the relationship between disease and the dirty, ill-drained parts of towns and had shown the need for drainage, sewerage and filtered water supplies. It ought to have been a spur to sanitary reform. 1832 was one of those periodic occasions in the nineteenth century in which government and the middle classes made a shocked discovery of poverty. When cholera returned in 1848 and 1849 there were many features of the epidemic which were familiar to those who had witnessed 1832. As cholera approached Britain in the summer of 1848, two important public health acts were passed through Parliament, the Public Health Act itself and the Nuisance Removal and Contagious Diseases Act.
