70 Morley: City chaos, contagion, Chadwick, and social justice Presenting the 1842 report as one on sanitation, a novel scientific and social field, Chadwick put forth a highly developed doc- ument in which he discussed air, sewers, dung heaps, water, the built environment, and people and argued that the problems re- garding each one were obstacles to the im- provement of others. In turn, an argument was put forth that improvements to sewers, for example, could positively improve mat- ters of water or housing, and in so doing serve as a catalyst to improve the structure of urban society. Environmental determinism was a defense for legal intervention, sug- gested Chadwick. To sit back and do nothing for whatever reason was insupportable. Cor- relating poorly planned environments with bad health and/or people’s immoral behavior, Chadwick presented an argument that was difficult for his critics to dismantle by mak- ing at the core of his case the ability of drains and clean water to improve morality. Sanita- tion, he proclaimed, would defuse rowdiness and decadence and make once “dangerous classes” compliant. It would make society more secure as well as improve health. With his confidence in society’s ability to further advance itself, Chadwick recommended cer- tain methods to allow urbanization to correct the wrongs it had helped produce earlier. In this way, urbanization, once the root of work- ing class burdens, was to now be controlled and so be its own antidote. To allude for a second time to the issue of Chadwick’s detractors, they attempted to stop any public health implementation post- 1842 by adhering to a line of reasoning about the dangers of having increased cen- tral government intervention. In a way, this was a result of the nature of Chadwick’s re- port and its factual rather than judgmental perspective and avoidance of contentious is- sues like the running of the economy. Thus to argue against the report’s particulars would have been injudicious. Instead, to weaken Chadwick’s case, critics focused on other issues, namely public health’s bureau- cracy and its fiscal cost. Both were vehe- mently attacked. Critics compared its central bureaucracy with problems in autocratic France. Chadwick’s report thus was not able to acquire legal fruition until 1848, when a suitable legal balance between local and na- tional governmental interests was found. With the passing of the Public Health Act, for the first time the industrial world pro- vided a proactive system of public health and required local governments, which be- came local health authorities, to guarantee minimum environmental standards [31]. Shaped by miasmic medical notions, i.e., disease was associated with noxious odors, impure air, and poor sanitation, the 1848 Public Health Act, though permissive, was a breakthrough in health culture [32]. It purveyed a new tradition of well-being in which health was a fundamental instrument of local democracy. To ward off disparage- ment about heightened bureaucracy, public health was to be not defined by central gov- ernment but rather by municipal govern- ments that would implement schemes given local needs and circumstances (though cer- tain minimum standards regarding financial and technical configurations were enforce- able from Westminster). Even those politi- cians most resistant to the call for public health, due to its perception with autocracy, were overcome as local autonomy was maintained, albeit with central government given the right to guarantee certain mini- mum standards. Any settlement with a death rate exceeding 23 per 1,000 of the popula- tion had to immediately form a localized Board of Health as did one at the request of 10 percent of the ratepayers. The provision of paved streets, clean water supplies, and sewage disposal was an imperative as was the introducing of rulings to new privately built housing that had to be constructed in accord with minimum structural standards and minimum amounts of light, air, and space. Taking a long-term approach to bet- terment, the act was a precursor to the assur- ance to bring more social justice to those hindered by the social and economic cir- cumstances instigated by the Industrial Rev- olution [33]. As R.A. Slaney MP remarked in the parliamentary debates leading up to the passing of the 1848 Act, public health at its core was not about kindness but was a call for fairness: “If they did not protect that