You are the improvement committee of a fast-growing industrial city in 1845. In the worst districts the average age at death has fallen into the teens and cholera returns every few years. You have twenty points of political capital and taxable rates to spend. Divide them, then watch sixty-five years of death rates answer you.
20
points still unspent
0
of 20 committed
Deaths per 1,000 people per year, 1845–1910
Death rate by 1910
32.0
per 1,000 · started at 32.0
Infant deaths
165
per 1,000 live births
Lives saved a year
0
in a city of 400,000
your cityno reform (wages and food alone)1845 baseline
Read the model honestly. These are plausible teaching numbers for a bad industrial district, not a real city’s registers. What is historical is the ranking: across European cities between 1880 and 1914, water supply, sewerage, milk and food regulation, less crowding and better nutrition explain most of the fall in urban mortality. Effective antibacterial drugs did not exist until the later 1930s.