Edwin Chadwick. English public health reformer and civil servant Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-90). Chadwick believed, correctly, that much ill health in Victorian Britain was caused by the overcrowded conditions in which the urban poor lived. His Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population was a monument in the history of public health and led to the Public Health Act in 1848 and the establishment of the General Board of Health in the same year. Even so the laws he helped to create were weak were opposed by many in power. As one of his opponents wrote in The Economist: Suffering and evil are nature's abomination, they cannot be got rid of"."