66 Morley: City chaos, contagion, Chadwick, and social justice Figure 5. George Cruikshank’s Cholera Consultation (1832) illustrates the ineffective and dishonest nature of health authorities. In the image, a board member is offering a toast: “May we preserve our health by bleeding the country.” ety of London (SSL) was founded with the purposeful objective of collecting and classi- fying particulars “illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society.” From its inception, the SSL organized working groups to explore serious social concerns, and from 1838, when the Journal of the Statistical So- ciety of London was introduced, the SSL pro- vided an outlet for medical practitioners to further consider the causes and conduct of disease. Consequently, the SSL’s periodical gave medical statisticians armed with data from the General Register Office (opened 1837) the opportunity to contribute to exist- ing debates, propose new health hypotheses, and offer pieces of evidence that supple- mented notes in existing journals such as The Lancet (founded in 1823) about the health of modern society. Overall, such analysis veri- fied the profits of civilization’s progress for the well-to-do who resided in salubrious sub- urban districts. They were shown to have been granted an apparent gain in their health levels, although it was noted to have occurred at the expense of suppressing a healthful ex- istence for the working population [20]. Attention must be placed also on the surfacing of sweeping occurrences of dis- ease in the 1830s. Although outbreaks of, for example, influenza, typhoid, typhus, and consumption were rife before 1830 and were so ubiquitous that the urban history of early industrial Britain was said to be the history of typhus and consumption [21], the 1830s demonstrated two new disease experiences. First, the impact of infirmity increased, as revealed by the tens of thousands who annu- ally died of infectious disease. In cities such as Birmingham and Bristol, the death rate per thousand people rose from 14.6 to 27.2, and 16.9 to 31 [22]. So widespread was the presence of disease by about 1840 that the average lifespan was just 26 years if some- one lived in a settlement of 100,000 people or more [23]. However, the second point of note was the arrival of cholera. Although common illnesses like whoop- ing cough, scarlet fever, smallpox, dysentery, diphtheria, scrofula, measles, typhoid, typhus, or influenza took many lives, it took an epi- demic in the early 1830s caused by a disease of overseas origin — cholera — to instigate a new dynamic to urban living and the subject of health [24]. Rapidly attaining an infamous status, a repute transpiring from its seemingly arbitrary manifestations, its virulence, ravaging