Cholera proved to be one of the largest problems of the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the nineteenth century. Its spread was kept unchecked for two different but related reasons: its prevalence among the working poor and the incorrect beleif about its method of spreading. Most medical authorities of the time insisted it was caused by foul-smelling air in cities rather than the contaminated water supplies that actually spread cholera.

Louis Pasteur was a French scientist who in the nineteenth century discovered that heating beer was enough to kill the bacteria that was responsible for causing the beer to go bad. His process of pasteurization allowed food to be preserved far more effectively and completely revolutionized the dairy industry, among others.

Cholera is an extremely deadly disease that was prevalent in urban European society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is spread through contaminated water and causes death through dehydration. The disease, like many diseases, disproportionately targets the poor and those without access to clean water. Studies of the disease led to improvements in public health, sanitation, and water treatments. The disease is now mostly eradicated in the Western world, but continues to routinely devastate parts of the developing world.

William Harvey was an English physician in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is most famous for his work On the Movement of the Heart and Blood, which explained the circulation of blood around the body. Harvey was a prolific writer on the craft of being a doctor in general and his ideas about hospitals, medical science, and medical practice were widely influential for centuries to come.

Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine in 1798. His revelation rested on an observation that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not ever contract the far more virulent and deleterious smallpox. So, Jenner started inoculating test subjects with cowpox and determined that it worked as a vaccine against smallpox. This invention would dramatically alter life for European people and contributed to the skyrocketing population growth of the next two centuries.

Bubonic Plague, sometimes called the Black Death, devastated European society routinely from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century. It remained occasionally threatening into the nineteenth century, but by the time the nineteenth century came to an end, improvements in sanitation and the widespread usage of quarantines rendered the plague far less threatening and virtually eradicated.

Andreas Vesalius was a Belgian physician who wrote a very important book on human anatomy called On the Fabric of the Human Body in the early sixteenth century. Vesalius produced the first accurate and detailed depiction of the human body in European history and greatly advanced the sum of medical understanding.

Edwin Chadwick is a well-known British social reformer who was active during the Industrial Revolution. Among other achievements, he is credited with helping pass the Public Health Act of 1848. Chadwick was concerned with the social well-being of the poor in British cities, in particular with the sanitation and public health of factory life.

Joseph Lister was a British surgeon in the nineteenth century who pioneered antiseptic surgery and greatly improved the safety and survival rate of surgeries. He expanded upon Louis Pasteur's ideas on “germ theory,” applying Pasteur’s theories to surgery and hospital experiences.

Up until the nineteenth century, when Louis Pasteur revolutionized our understanding of what causes diseases, it was commonly believed throughout Europe that noxious smells in the air caused and spread diseases. This theory was called the Miasmatic Theory.