Victorians Stage 3 Comp - Disease - Comprehension Pack PDF

STAGE 3 Unit focus: Victorians Text focus: Information Text Disease A child born in Britain today has a good chance of living until they are 100 years old. Somebody...

STAGE 3 Unit focus: Victorians Text focus: Information Text Disease A child born in Britain today has a good chance of living until they are 100 years old. Somebody born during Queen Victoria’s reign was lucky if they lived much beyond 30. Hard, manual labour and poor living conditions meant that most people didn’t survive for very long. Being a child was a very dangerous business in Victorian Britain. Even if we don’t count those who died doing dangerous jobs, lots didn’t live for very long. Infant mortality rates record how many children die before their first birthday. Around 150 children out of every 1000 died before their first birthday. In the cities, this was as high as 200 in every thousand. This didn’t really change during the Victorian period. If you survived your first birthday, it didn’t get much easier. In the 1850s and 1860s, around 160 out of every 1000 children died before their fi h birthday. This did get dramatically better during Victoria’s reign. By the time she died, around 80 out of every 1000 children died before reaching 5 years old. Today, it is roughly 0.3 out of every 1000. One thing counted for most of those deaths - disease. Disease was rife in Victorian Britain. Houses were crammed into small areas, and families o en shared them with others. Diseases were able to spread rapidly from one house to the next. Epidemics shot through neighbourhoods. Scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhus and typhoid were dreaded. Today, these diseases are rare and treatable. Back then, they were o en a death sentence. Most poor people were always hungry and malnourished. Their bodies were weak from a lack of food and from their hard work. This meant that they were especially at risk from disease. One disease terrified everybody - cholera. Cholera was unheard of in Britain before Queen Victoria. It arrived from Asia in 1830. The first epidemic struck in 1832. It killed 52,000 people. Another 53,000 died between 1848 and 1849. Nobody knew how cholera spread or how to stop it. Not only were Victorian doctors largely A unaware of what germs were or how they worked, but they had never seen ding ro Rea und all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed e um C u r r ic ul Th http://www.literacyshedplus.com cholera before. They had no idea how it affected people. There were epidemics of flu and typhoid during this time, but none terrified the public as much as cholera. The big problem with cholera was that it did something unthinkable - it killed the rich as well. Most diseases affected the poor a lot more than the rich. Wealthy people believed that this was their own fault. Now that they were dying, too, they suddenly wanted something done about it. It became clear that cholera spread in dirty water. The rich and poor people all took their water from the same wells and rivers, so they were all affected. The River Thames was so polluted with sewage that it affected the water in London for miles. Something had to be done. In 1865, a new sewer system was opened in London. It was designed by Joseph Bazalgette and was so successful that it still drains London’s toilets today. Cholera returned to London for the last time in 1866. It only affected people who hadn’t been connected to the sewers yet. Once they were, it went away for good. RETRIEVAL FOCUS 1. How many out of every 1000 children died before they reached one year of age in the Victorian era? 2. How many people died of cholera in 1832? 3. How did cholera spread? 4. Give another example of a dangerous Victorian disease. 5. What in the River Thames caused cholera? VIPERS QUESTIONS S Why did people suddenly start trying to solve the cholera problem? V Which word describes a disease moving around? S Why did doctors struggle to deal with cholera? I What evidence is there that Bazalgette’s sewage system was well-designed? V Find and copy a word that is a synonym for “beyond belief”. all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com