# data[].attributes.body
Dr. William was known for being the first to demonstrate the use of ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846.

Williams contributes were significant because he changedthe practice of surgery by taking away pain. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Thomas-Green-Morton

# data[].attributes.body
Rene was know for inventingf the stethoscope and a pioneer in auscultation.

Rene's contributes were significant because he transformed the medical field by improving the diagnosis of chest and heart conditions.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Laennec

# data[].attributes.body
Ignaz was known for Known for introducing hand hygiene in medical practice to prevent puerperal fever.

Ignaz's contributes were significant because most of the world has encourage to wash they're hands and have good hygiene.

# data[].attributes.body
Florence was known for founding modern nursing, and was recognized for during the Crimean War.

Her contributes were significant because she encouraged sanitary conditions in hospitals and introducing practices like strict hygiene and organized care which is how hospitals are now today.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Florence-Nightingale

# data[].attributes.body
Dorothea was known for advocation for the mentally ill and helped reform mental asylums in the United States.

Her contributes were significant because she made better treatment of the mentally ill then leading to the creation and improvement of mental health institutions in the United States and beyond.

# data[].attributes.body
Elizabeth was known for being the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Her contributes were significant because she paved the way for women in medicine and founded medical schools and clinics advancing opportunities for women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Table of Contents

What is Elizabeth Blackwell known for?

Who were Elizabeth Blackwell's parents?

Where was Elizabeth Blackwell born and raised?

Where was Elizabeth Blackwell educated?

What were Elizabeth Blackwell's achievements?

Read a brief summary of this topic

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Elizabeth Blackwell, (born February 3, 1821, Counterslip, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England-died May 31, 1910, Hastings, Sussex), Anglo-American physician who is considered the first woman doctor of medicine in modern times.

Elizabeth Blackwell was of a large, prosperous, and cultured family and was well educated by private tutors. Financial reverses and the family's liberal social and religious views prompted them to immigrate to the United States in the summer of 1832. Soon after taking up residence in New York, her father, Samuel Blackwell, became active in abolitionist activities. The Blackwells moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1835 and to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1838. Soon afterward Samuel's death left the family in poverty, and Elizabeth and two sisters opened a private school. Later Elizabeth taught school in Henderson, Kentucky, and in 1845-47 in North and South Carolina.

During the latter period Blackwell undertook the study of medicine privately with sympathetic physicians, and in 1847 she began seeking admission to a medical school. All the leading schools rejected her application, but she was at length admitted, almost by fluke, to Geneva Medical College (a forerunner of Hobart College) in Geneva, New York. Her months there were extremely difficult. Townspeople and much of the male student body ostracized and harassed her, and she was at first even barred from classroom demonstration. She persevered, however, and in January 1849, ranked first in her class, she became the first woman in the United States to graduate from medical school and the first modern-day woman doctor of medicine.

In April, having become a naturalized U.S. citizen, Blackwell traveled to England to seek further training, and in May she went on to Paris, where in June she entered the midwives' course at La Maternité. While there she contracted an infectious eye disease that left her blind in one eye and forced her to abandon hope of becoming a surgeon. In October 1850 she returned to England and worked at St. Bartholomew's Hospital under Dr. (later Sir) James Paget. In the summer of 1851 she returned to New York, where she was refused posts in the city's hospitals and dispensaries and was even unable to rent private consulting quarters. Her private practice was very slow to develop, and in the meantime she wrote a series of lectures, published in 1852 as The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls.

In 1853 Blackwell opened a small dispensary in a slum district. Within a few years she was joined by her younger sister, Dr. Emily Blackwell, and by Dr. Marie E. Zakrzewska, and in May 1857 the dispensary, greatly enlarged, was incorporated as the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. In January 1859, during a year-long lecture tour of Great Britain, she became the first woman to have her name placed on the British medical register. At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, she helped organize the Woman's Central Association of Relief and the U.S. Sanitary Commission and worked mainly through the former to select and train nurses for war service.

In November 1868 a plan long in the perfecting, developed in large part in consultation with Florence Nightingale in England, bore fruit in the opening of the Woman's Medical College at the infirmary. Elizabeth Blackwell set very high standards for admission, academic and clinical training, and certification for the school, which continued in operation for 31 years; she herself occupied the chair of hygiene. In 1869 Blackwell moved permanently to England. She established a successful private practice, helped organize the National Health Society in 1871, and in 1875 was appointed professor of gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women. She retained the latter position until 1907, when an injury forced her to retire. Among her other writings are The Religion of Health (1871), Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children (1878), The Human Element in Sex (1884), her autobiographical Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895), and Essays in Medical Sociology (1902).

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Kara Rogers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elizabeth Blackwell, (born February 3, 1821, Counterslip, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England-died May 31, 1910, Hastings, Sussex), Anglo-American physician who is considered the first woman doctor of medicine in modern times. Elizabeth Blackwell was of a large, prosperous, and cultured family and was well educated by private tutors.

# data[].attributes.body
April 5, 1827----February 10, 1912

Joseph Lister was known for using carbolic acid to prevent infection.

Joseph listers contributes were significant because significantly reducing infection and mortality rates in surgical patients. He laid the groundwork for modern sterilization practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Joseph Lister, (born April 5, 1827, Upton, Essex, England-died February 10, 1912, Walmer, Kent), British surgeon and medical scientist who was the founder of antiseptic medicine and a pioneer in preventive medicine. While his method, based on the use of antiseptics, is no longer employed, his principle-that bacteria must never gain entry into an operation wound-remains the basis of surgery to this day. He was made a baronet in 1883 and raised to the peerage in 1897.

Education

Lister was the second son of Joseph Jackson Lister and his wife, Isabella Harris, members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. J.J. Lister, a wine merchant and an amateur physicist and microscopist, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for his discovery that led to the modern achromatic (non-colour-distorting) microscope.

While both parents took an active part in Lister's education, his father instructing him in natural history and the use of the microscope, Lister received his formal schooling in two Quaker institutions, which laid far more emphasis upon natural history and science than did other schools. He became interested in comparative anatomy, and, before his 16th birthday, he had decided upon a surgical career.

After taking an arts course at University College, London, he enrolled in the faculty of medical science in October 1848. A brilliant student, he was graduated a bachelor of medicine with honours in 1852; in the same year he became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and house surgeon at University College Hospital. A visit to Edinburgh in the fall of 1853 led to Lister's appointment as assistant to James Syme, the greatest surgical teacher of his day, and in October 1856 he was appointed surgeon to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In April he had married Syme's eldest daughter. Lister, a deeply religious man, joined the Scottish Episcopal Church. The marriage, although childless, was a happy one, his wife entering fully into Lister's professional life.

When three years later the Regius Professorship of Surgery at Glasgow University fell vacant, Lister was elected from seven applicants. In August 1861 he was appointed surgeon to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he was in charge of wards in the new surgical block. The managers hoped that hospital disease (now known as operative sepsis-infection of the blood by disease-producing microorganisms) would be greatly decreased in their new building. The hope proved vain, however. Lister reported that, in his Male Accident Ward, between 45 and 50 percent of his amputation cases died from sepsis between 1861 and 1865.

Work in antisepsis

In this ward Lister began his experiments with antisepsis. Much of his earlier published work had dealt with the mechanism of coagulation of the blood and role of the blood vessels in the first stages of inflammation. Both researches depended upon the microscope and were directly connected with the healing of wounds. Lister had already tried out methods to encourage clean healing and had formed theories to account for the prevalence of sepsis. Discarding the popular concept of miasma-direct infection by bad air-he postulated that sepsis might be caused by a pollen-like dust. There is no evidence that he believed this dust to be living matter, but he had come close to the truth. It is therefore all the more surprising that he became acquainted with the work of the bacteriologist Louis Pasteur only in 1865.

Pasteur had arrived at his theory that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease by experiments on fermentation and putrefaction. Lister's education and his familiarity with the microscope, the process of fermentation, and the natural phenomena of inflammation and coagulation of the blood impelled him to accept Pasteur's theory as the full revelation of a half-suspected truth. At the start he believed the germs were carried solely by the air. This incorrect opinion proved useful, for it obliged him to adopt the only feasible method of surgically clean treatment. In his attempt to interpose an antiseptic barrier between the wound and the air, he protected the site of operation from infection by the surgeon's hands and instruments. He found an effective antiseptic in carbolic acid, which had already been used as a means of cleansing foul-smelling sewers and had been empirically advised as a wound dressing in 1863. Lister first successfully used his new method on August 12, 1865; in March 1867 he published a series of cases. The results were dramatic. Between 1865 and 1869, surgical mortality fell from 45 to 15 percent in his Male Accident Ward.

In 1869, Lister succeeded Syme in the chair of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh. There followed the seven happiest years of his life when, largely as the result of German experiments with antisepsis during the Franco-German War, his clinics were crowded with visitors and eager students. In 1875 Lister made a triumphal tour of the leading surgical centres in Germany. The next year he visited America but was received with little enthusiasm except in Boston and New York City.

Lister's work had been largely misunderstood in England and the United States. Opposition was directed against his germ theory rather than against his "carbolic treatment." The majority of practicing surgeons were unconvinced; while not antagonistic, they awaited clear proof that antisepsis constituted a major advance. Lister was not a spectacular operative surgeon and refused to publish statistics. Edinburgh, despite the ancient fame of its medical school, was regarded as a provincial centre. Lister understood that he must convince London before the usefulness of his work would be generally accepted.

His chance came in 1877, when he was offered the chair of Clinical Surgery at King's College. On October 26, 1877, Lister, at King's College Hospital, for the first time performed the then-revolutionary operation of wiring a fractured patella, or kneecap. It entailed the deliberate conversion of a simple fracture, carrying no risk to life, into a compound fracture, which often resulted in generalized infection and death. Lister's proposal was widely publicized and aroused much opposition. Thus, the entire success of his operation carried out under antiseptic conditions forced surgical opinion throughout the world to accept that his method had added greatly to the safety of operative surgery.

More fortunate than many pioneers, Lister saw the almost universal acceptance of his principle during his working life. He retired from surgical practice in 1893, after the death of his wife in the previous year. Many honours came to him. Created a baronet in 1883, he was made Baron Lister of Lyme Regis in 1897 and appointed one of the 12 original members of the Order of Merit in 1902. He was a gentle, shy, unassuming man, firm in his purpose because he humbly believed himself to be directed by God. He was uninterested in social success or financial reward. In person he was handsome, with a fine athletic figure, fresh complexion, hazel eyes, and silver hair. For some years before his death, however, he was almost completely blind and deaf. Lister wrote no books but contributed many papers to professional journals. These are contained in The Collected Papers of Joseph, Baron Lister, 2 vol. (1909).
Frederick F. Cartwright

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joseph Lister | Biography, Facts, & Antiseptic Medicine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Joseph Lister, British surgeon and medical scientist, the founder of antiseptic medicine and a pioneer in preventive medicine. While his method, based on the use of antiseptics, is no longer employed, his principle-that bacteria must never gain entry into an operation wound-remains the basis of surgery to this day.

# data[].attributes.body
April 5, 1827----February 10, 1912

Robert koch was known for identifying the bacteria causing tuberculosis and cholera laying foundational work for bacteriology.'

His contributes were significant because he dentified the specific bacteria that caused diseases like anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Koch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Table of Contents

What is Robert Koch famous for?

What are Koch's postulates?

Where did Robert Koch receive his medical training?

Read a brief summary of this topic

Robert Koch, in full Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch, (born Dec. 11, 1843, Clausthal, Hannover [now Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Ger.]-died May 27, 1910, Baden-Baden, Ger.), German physician and one of the founders of bacteriology. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle (1876) and the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883). For his discoveries in regard to tuberculosis, he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

Early training

Koch attended the University of Göttingen, where he studied medicine, graduating in 1866. He then became a physician in various provincial towns. After serving briefly as a field surgeon during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, he became district surgeon in Wollstein, where he built a small laboratory. Equipped with a microscope, a microtome (an instrument for cutting thin slices of tissue), and a homemade incubator, he began his study of algae, switching later to pathogenic (disease-causing) organisms.

One of Koch's teachers at Göttingen had been the anatomist and histologist Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle, who in 1840 had published the theory that infectious diseases are caused by living microscopic organisms. In 1850 the French parasitologist Casimir Joseph Davaine was among the first to observe organisms in the blood of diseased animals. In 1863 he reported the transmission of anthrax by the inoculation of healthy sheep with the blood of animals dying of the disease and the finding of microscopic rod-shaped bodies in the blood of both groups of sheep. Inspired by the work of the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, Davaine showed that it was highly probable that, because the sheep did not become diseased in the absence of these rodlike bodies, anthrax was due to the presence of such organisms in the blood. The natural history of the disease was, nevertheless, far from complete.

It was at that point that Koch began. He cultivated the anthrax organisms in suitable media on microscope slides, demonstrated their growth into long filaments, and discovered the formation within them of oval, translucent bodies-dormant spores. Koch found that the dried spores could remain viable for years, even under exposed conditions. The finding explained the recurrence of the disease in pastures long unused for grazing, for the dormant spores could, under the right conditions, develop into the rod-shaped bacteria (bacilli) that cause anthrax. The anthrax life cycle, which Koch had discovered, was announced and illustrated at Breslau in 1876, on the invitation of Ferdinand Cohn, an eminent botanist. Julius Cohnheim, a famous pathologist, was deeply impressed by Koch's presentation. "It leaves nothing more to be proved," he said.

I regard it as the greatest discovery ever made with bacteria and I believe that this is not the last time that this young Robert Koch will surprise and shame us by the brilliance of his investigations.

Cohn, whose discovery of spores had been published in 1875, was also very much impressed and generously helped to prepare the engraving for Koch's epochal paper, which he also published. One of Cohn's pupils, Joseph Schroeter, found that chromogenic (colour-forming) bacteria would grow on such solid substrates as potato, coagulated egg white, meat, and bread and that those colonies were capable of forming new colonies of the same colour, consisting of organisms of the same type. That was the starting point of Koch's pure-culture techniques, which he worked out a few years later. That a disease organism might be cultured outside the body was a concept introduced by Louis Pasteur, but the pure-culture techniques for doing so were perfected by Koch, whose precise and ingenious experiments demonstrated the complete life cycle of an important organism. The anthrax work afforded for the first time convincing proof of the definite causal relation of a particular microorganism to a particular disease.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

In 1877 Koch published an important paper on the investigation, preservation, and photographing of bacteria. His work was illustrated by superb photomicrographs. In his paper he described his method of preparing thin layers of bacteria on glass slides and fixing them by gentle heat. Koch also invented the apparatus and the procedure for the very useful hanging-drop technique, whereby microorganisms could be cultured in a drop of nutrient solution on the underside of a glass slide.

In 1878 Koch summarized his experiments on the etiology of wound infection. By inoculating animals with material from various sources, he produced six types of infection, each caused by a specific microorganism. He then transferred these infections by inoculation through several kinds of animals, reproducing the original six types. In that study, he observed differences in pathogenicity for different species of hosts and demonstrated that the animal body is an excellent apparatus for the cultivation of bacteria.

Koch, now recognized as a scientific investigator of the first rank, obtained a position in Berlin in the Imperial Health Office, where he set up a laboratory in bacteriology. With his collaborators, he devised new research methods to isolate pathogenic bacteria. Koch determined guidelines to prove that a disease is caused by a specific organism. These four basic criteria, called Koch's postulates, are:

1. A specific microorganism is always associated with a given disease.

2. The microorganism can be isolated from the diseased animal and grown in pure culture in the laboratory.

3. The cultured microbe will cause disease when transferred to a healthy animal.

4. The same type of microorganism can be isolated from the newly infected animal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Robert Koch, in full Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch, (born Dec. 11, 1843, Clausthal, Hannover [now Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Ger.]-died May 27, 1910, Baden-Baden, Ger.), German physician and one of the founders of bacteriology. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle (1876) and the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883).

# data[].attributes.body
April 5, 1827-----February 10, 1912

Louis Paseur was known for his for his discoveries in microbiology like vaccine development.

His contributes were significant because he developed pasteurization to kill bacteria in food and beverages and created vaccines for diseases like rabies and anthrax.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What did Louis Pasteur discover?

What did Louis Pasteur invent?

What was Louis Pasteur's family like?

Louis Pasteur (born December 27, 1822, Dole, France-died September 28, 1895, Saint-Cloud) French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur's contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without precedent. He pioneered the study of molecular asymmetry; discovered that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease; originated the process of pasteurization; saved the beer, wine, and silk industries in France; and developed vaccines against anthrax and rabies.

Pasteur's academic positions were numerous, and his scientific accomplishments earned him France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honour, as well as election to the Académie des Sciences and many other distinctions. Today there are some 30 institutes and an impressive number of hospitals, schools, buildings, and streets that bear his name-a set of honours bestowed on few scientists.

Early education

Pasteur's father, Jean-Joseph Pasteur, was a tanner and a sergeant major decorated with the Legion of Honour during the Napoleonic Wars. This fact probably instilled in the younger Pasteur the strong patriotism that later was a defining element of his character. Louis Pasteur was an average student in his early years, but he was gifted in drawing and painting. His pastels and portraits of his parents and friends, made when he was 15, were later kept in the museum of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. After attending primary school in Arbois, where his family had moved, and secondary school in nearby Besançon, he earned his bachelor of arts degree (1840) and bachelor of science degree (1842) at the Royal College of Besançon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Louis Pasteur | Biography, Inventions, Achievements, Germ Theory, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Louis Pasteur, French chemist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur's contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without precedent. His accomplishments earned him France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honour. Learn about his life and discoveries.

# data[].attributes.body
March 27, 1845 ---- February 10, 1923

Wilhelm was known for discovering X-rays revolutionizing medical diagnostics.

His contributess were significant because he revolutionized diagnostic medicine by enabling internal imaging of the human body without invasive procedures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Röntgen also spelled Roentgen, (born March 27, 1845, Lennep, Prussia [now Remscheid, Germany]-died February 10, 1923, Munich, Germany), physicist who was a recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1901, for his discovery of X-rays, which heralded the age of modern physics and revolutionized diagnostic medicine.

Röntgen studied at the Polytechnic in Zürich and then was professor of physics at the universities of Strasbourg (1876-79), Giessen (1879-88), Würzburg (1888-1900), and Munich (1900-20). His research also included work on elasticity, capillary action of fluids, specific heats of gases, conduction of heat in crystals, absorption of heat by gases, and piezoelectricity.

In 1895, while experimenting with electric current flow in a partially evacuated glass tube (cathode-ray tube), Röntgen observed that a nearby piece of barium platinocyanide gave off light when the tube was in operation. He theorized that when the cathode rays (electrons) struck the glass wall of the tube, some unknown radiation was formed that traveled across the room, struck the chemical, and caused the fluorescence. Further investigation revealed that paper, wood, and aluminum, among other materials, are transparent to this new form of radiation. He found that it affected photographic plates, and, since it did not noticeably exhibit any properties of light, such as reflection or refraction, he mistakenly thought the rays were unrelated to light. In view of its uncertain nature, he called the phenomenon X-radiation, though it also became known as Röntgen radiation. He took the first X-ray photographs, of the interiors of metal objects and of the bones in his wife's hand.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen | German physicist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, physicist who was a recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1901, for his discovery of X-rays, which heralded the age of modern physics and revolutionized diagnostic medicine. Röntgen studied at the Polytechnic in Zürich and then was professor of physics at the

# data[].attributes.body
March 10, 1867------September 1, 1940

Lillian wald was know founding American community nursing and the Henry Street Settlement.

Her contributes were significant because She advocated for health care access for the poor, immigrants, and vulnerable populations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica | View Edit History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lillian D. Wald, American nurse and social worker who founded the internationally known Henry Street Settlement in New York City (1893). Wald grew up in her native Cincinnati, Ohio, and in Rochester, New York. She was educated in a private school, and after abandoning a plan to attend Vassar

# data[].attributes.body
The Cholera Epidemic was known for being A major outbreak of a disease contributing to advancements in public health.

The epidemics contributes were significant because it highlighted the importance of sanitation and public health in controlling infectious diseases, paving the way for sanitary reforms in cities.

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/disasters/cholera-1832.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New York City (NYC), throughout the 19th century, grew at an incredible speed. Each year thousands of immigrants were attracted to the opportunities it presented. However, this dramatic increase in population created problems for which its leadership had no experience. One of the many dangers of living in such a congested and unsanitary urban area was that of disease. At the beginning of the 19th century cholera, emanating first from the Asian countries, such as India, spread across Europe through sailors traveling from sea port to sea port. By 1831, the cholera epidemic had already struck England. In June of 1832, cholera had made its way to ports in Canada and traveled down from St. Laurence and the Hudson River to lower Manhattan, where it grew into an epidemic. Many wealthy Manhattan residents, aware of its approach, moved away to the country side to avoid infection. However, the poor who inhabited lower Manhattan had no choice but to stay and face the disease. With no effective method of treatment, 3,500 people, mostly poor immigrants, died during the course of the plague.

NYC was organized through a grid system made up of fifteen wards, or distinct neighborhoods. In 1832, about 250,000 people inhabited the area bellow 20th street. The majority of them lived below 14th street in dark dwellings, surrounded by the stench and filth of the city. An area known as five points (now located in Foley Square and Chinatown) was the first ward to be hit by an outbreak of cholera. Five points, inhabited by poor Irish catholic immigrants and African-Americans, created a negative perception of the poor amongst the wealthy classes. It was believed that God had brought the cholera epidemic to New York in order to punish the poor for their debauchery and indulgence in sin.

The doctors at the time were not at all equipped to deal with cholera. Many of them believed that cholera was caused by poisonous vapors from rotting matter and that it was not actually contagious. Without a clear understanding of how the disease worked, they attempted to treat patients using traditional methods. In addition to bleeding, most doctors gave them medicine such as calomel (mercury chloride) and laudanum which was an opiate. However, most infected people died within one or two days of admittance to hospitals. Out of panic, many private hospitals closed down and emergency facilities in schools had to be opened. Doctors treating cholera patients often got infected themselves and nurses became hard to employ.

The Board of Health, first established in 1805, had very little power and recourses. Despite this fact, during the worst of the plague, they opened up five emergency hospitals for the sick and began a cleaning operation throughout the city streets. However, their involvement was only temporary and after the cholera epidemic died out, they continued to take their usual passive role in the NYC council.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
weissman center for international business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New York City (NYC), throughout the 19th century, grew at an incredible speed. Each year thousands of immigrants were attracted to the opportunities it presented. However, this dramatic increase in population created problems for which its leadership had no experience. One of the many dangers of living in such a congested and unsanitary urban area was that of disease.

# data[].attributes.headline
Industrial Revolution in the United States (late 18th to 19th century)

# data[].attributes.subject
Industrial Revolution in the United States (late 18th to 19th century)

# data[].attributes.body
This period was known for the spurred massive urbanization, leading to various social, health, and economic reforms.

The industrial revolutions contributes were significant because it lead to better sanitation on workplaces.

https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Was the Industrial Revolution?

Though a few innovations were developed as early as the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution began in earnest by the 1830s and 1840s in Britain, and soon spread to the rest of the world, including the United States.

Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.

Spinning Jenny

Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true "cottage industry," with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.

Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the spinning jenny (a wooden frame with multiple spindles), the flying shuttle, the water frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.

More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain's new textile factories could meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad, where the British Empire's many overseas colonies provided a captive market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron industry also adopted new innovations.

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced higher-quality material, enabling Britain's iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the later growth of the railroad industry.

Impact of Steam Power

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the "atmospheric steam engine," Newcomen's invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts.

In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with one of Newcomen's models, adding a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals.

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

Transportation During the Industrial Revolution

Britain's road network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in use across Britain by 1815.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain's rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Banking and Communication in the Industrial Revolution

In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith, who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.

Banks and industrial financiers soon rose to new prominence during this period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States.

Cooke and Wheatstone's system would be used for railroad signaling, as the speed of the new steam-powered trains created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Labor Movement

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation, miserable housing conditions and a lack of safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious (and sometimes dangerous), and many workers-including children-were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.

Such dramatic changes and abuses fueled opposition to industrialization worldwide, including the " Luddites," known for their violent resistance to changes in Britain's textile industry.

Did you know? The word "luddite" refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ludd, though he may have been an apocryphal figure.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions, as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright's designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution."

The United States followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by innovations "borrowed" from Britain as well as by homegrown inventors like Eli Whitney. Whitney's 1793 invention of the cotton gin (short for "engine") revolutionized the nation's cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton-producing South).

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.

By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America's northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world's leading industrial nation.

Effects of the Industrial Revolution

Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex.

On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and environmental pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and ingenious inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.

Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.

Photo Galleries

Sources

Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Claire Hopley, "A History of the British Cotton Industry." British Heritage Travel, July 29, 2006
William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010
Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2007
Matthew White, "Georgian Britain: The Industrial Revolution." British Library, October 14, 2009

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Industrial Revolution: Definition, Inventions & Dates - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, a time of great growth in technologies and inventions, transformed rural societies into industrialized, urban ones.

# data[].attributes.headline
Urbanization in the United States (19th century)

# data[].attributes.subject
Urbanization in the United States (19th century)

# data[].attributes.body
This period was known for the rapid growth of cities, overcrowding, and increased demand for public health measures.

Brought about public health challenges that led to reforms in sanitation, housing, and medical care.

https://lboustan.scholar.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf4146/files/lboustan/files/research21_urban_handbook.pdf#:~:text=The%20US%20population%20experienced%20little,six%2Dfold%20to%2060%20percent.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.alternative_text
Urbanization in the United States (19th century)

# data[].attributes.headline
Social Darwinism (late 19th to early 20th century)

# data[].attributes.subject
Social Darwinism (late 19th to early 20th century)

# data[].attributes.body
Social darwinism was know for the transformations applying evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest.

Social darwinisms contributes were significant because scientists worked to improve public health and living conditions in response to social challenges.

https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/social-darwinism