The Act of 1848 created a parallel Board of Health in Whitehall ...

The Act of 1848 created a parallel Board of Health in Whitehall with power to create Local Boards and compel them to discharge a great variety of duties, from the regulation of slaughter-houses, to the supply of water and the management of cemeteries.

It was a patchy and cumbrous piece of legislation: one municipality might adopt the Act and its neighbour not, and cholera might bear down on a district, while the average mortality of the last seven years had been too low to give the Board a ground for intervention.

And when they were allowed to intervene, they must first inquire and then report, and then make a provisional order and then get the order confirmed, and then, most difficult of all, see that it was not

evaded by local jobbers, backed by the Private

Enterprise Society.' There was not enough staff to go round: the local doctors could not be got to report their wealthy patients for maintaining nuisances: it is not supposed that municipal affairs as a rule engage either the most intelligent or the most disinterested of mankind, and the impact of the irresistible Chadwick on the immovable incuriousness of the small municipal mind could only end in explosions.' The virtue of the Act of 1848 lay less in its immediate results than in the large opportunities it gave for local initiative and scientific intelligence to work together. Gradually, over the country as a whole, rapidly in some aspiring boroughs, the filth and horror which had crawled over the early Victorian towns was penned back in its proper lairs, and perhaps the first step towards dealing effectively with slums was to recognize them as slums and not as normal phenomena of urban existence.

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