Proposed by Edwin Chadwick in 1848, The Public Health Act was institutionalized in order to improve the health of commoners. This action was a response to their poor health standards and living conditions following a cholera outbreak in 1848. 

In Jane Eyre, Jane is sent to a boarding school where sickness runs rampant and the standard of living is less than ideal. Brontë writes, "Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at a time...Many, already smitten, went home only to die: some die at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly; the nature of the malady forbidding delay" (141). Following a typhus outbreak in the school, the school takes a turn for the better with the appointment of a new headmaster. The new authority cleans up the poor living conditions and the people of the time realize how important sanitation is for the common people to exist healthily and happily. The mistreatment of the less fortunate students at Lowood becomes a metaphor for the broader societal neglect of the disadvantaged. The conditions at the institution were used as a convenient representation of Brontë’s real society in which public health and social reform were only just beginning to be addressed by legislation like the Public Health Act of 1848. 

UK Parliament