64 Morley: City chaos, contagion, Chadwick, and social justice Figure 3. A late 1820s view of London’s water: “Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water, being a correct representation of that precious stuff doled out to us!” tions. To compound the precarious situation opportunists, such as local merchants and shopkeepers, lawyers, farmers, landowners, and others with available capital, attempted to exploit urban growth for the purpose of acquiring financial gain. To maximize prof- its, unqualified builders (i.e., available la- borers) were paid to rapidly construct back-to-back terraces, a small housing form lacking in basic utilities like clean water and sewers but erected solely as a machine to manufacture rent [15]. Even if nearby water supplies did exist, they were commonly in- termittent in supply, far from hygienic or fit for human consumption due to sewerage contaminating local rivers, wells and springs (Figure 3). To illustrate this point, water ex- aminations in Nottingham on average had almost 45 grams of solid effluent for every gallon of water assessed. Such a finding was clearly insupportable on humanitarian grounds, and to comprehend how the British shaped a strategy to manage such problems, a number of developments need to be expli- cated. To begin with, a number of social-med- ical reports were composed in the 1830s that emphasized the shocking reality of urban life, in particular the vast daily vol- ume of waste produced and impure water consumed. Inspired by Thomas Southwood Smith’s Treatise of Fever in 1830, later manuscripts such as those by James Kay- Shuttleworth and William Farr presented details of living that offered a passage of so- cial discovery to the largely ignorant middle classes and disclosed a direct correlation be- tween impoverishment, the slum environ- ment, and endemic fever. Strengthening social and medical debates about disease and the state of urban environments, such individuals, through applying statistical analysis, also developed rational models re- garding the origin and propagation of urban-based illness [16]. In due course, this allowed a body of progressive professionals to come forward, broadening British epi- demiological thinking by incorporating new conceptual medical and demographic no- tions, and through empirical investigation rebuffing many existing hypotheses about the distribution of disease. Significantly, too, they put forward “facts” pertaining to society’s condition which: