After researching health in Victorian England last week, I thought it was very interesting to now read about Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. He starts this text off by saying “We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” He was right; it was very hard to live a healthy lifestyle during this time period. Natural Selection is all about adapting to your environment to survive and reproduce, but that was so difficult under these harsh conditions. As we learned, the urban areas tended to be worse due to the people being lower class. They couldn’t afford proper drainage systems so the towns would flood and lead to mold and fungi growth. In addition, the sewer water would often get mixed with the drinking water which caused a number of diseases such as Cholera. As a result, the poorer neighborhoods were more susceptible to disease and they died off faster than people with more money. We saw this in Wuthering Heights when most of the characters died during the plot of the story and the oldest person was only 39. As time went on, we gained more knowledge and technology that has helped us fight off these diseases, but during the Victorian era this is how Natural Selection worked.