Morley: City chaos, contagion, Chadwick, and social justice 65 Figure 4. Louis-Léopold Boilley’s Consultation de Médicine 1760 (left) and Consultation de Médicine 1823 (right, published mid-1820s). In pre-revolution France, the doctors are shown to be old and dazed. In the later era, the doctors are shown in a prime of life and using a sci- entific approach to the study of health. 1. Acted as crude indicators of mate- rial progress; 2. Drew attention to unforeseen prob- lem areas such as poor housing, crime, and avoidable ill-health and mortality; and 3. Intertwined health with psychology and morality. Consequently, the overall health debate called attention to a surfeit of potential phys- ical and moral predisposing determinants. Armed with its “facts,” the medical community, in effect, granted a caveat that portended to a bleak future. The view pre- sented by modern medical practitioners and statisticians, despite their limited scientific knowledge, was unmistakable: Urban soci- ety was ailing and in need of improvement [17]. The British city was a setting con- firmed as unsafe to one’s health. Complementing the aforesaid social and medical state of affairs in Britain was the rise and influence of new journals, de- scribed later, and French medical research [18]. Although French medical practices (Figure 4) had an effect at institutions such as the London Fever Hospital before the 1820s, their impact extended by the 1830s into offering original treatment techniques, innovative ways to classify and distinguish one ailment from another, and bestowing new physiological, anatomical, and pharma- cological information. Notably, such med- ical dissemination had important qualities. It imparted a promise of better health for all and offered a new consciousness of the body to the phlegmatic middle classes. Also of importance were the works of French physicians like Louis René Villermé, whose groundbreaking work in Paris verified a correlation between poverty, poor health, and high rates of mortality, and periodicals like Annales d’Hygiène Publique et Médicine Lègale (Chronicles of Public Hy- giene and Legal Medicine), which provided further fuel to the vigorous debate about the physical and moral condition of cities. In this milieu, French research reinforced British suspicions associated with the materializa- tion of economic growth and urbanization. The human cost of society’s unmanaged urban development was unmistakable [19]. Notable developments occurred in Britain as well. In 1834, the Statistical Soci-