Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain, Part I Vol 1

Michelle Allen-Emerson, Tina Young Choi, Christopher S Hamlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138756854
• eBook ISBN: 9781000559057
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. An extensive general introduction sets the material in context and extends the debate to provide a contemporary international perspective.

CHOLERA RETURNS IN GREAT BRITAIN (1832)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112723-9

Cholera Returns in Great Britain, 1832.

An early example of statistical analysis applied to an epidemic, this document, transcribed from sixteen handwritten manuscript pages, exemplifies the period’s dedication to meticulous recordkeeping. The anonymous hand collecting and organizing these figures makes use of an ‘objective’, scientific approach to what would have been an overwhelming social and biological phenomenon; it records the impact and extent of an event that would have been visible to most only at the local or individual level. The names, symptoms and circumstances associated with each case are reduced here to sameness, one case rendered equivalent to the next. At the same time, the raw neutrality of these numbers and their alphabetical presentation distinguish this document from later uses of statistics where, as seen in other documents in this volume (see, for example, pp. 208–13), statistics are presented strategically, in the service of a particular sanitary argument.

The statistical sciences in Britain were still in the process of defining their purpose and methodology¹; for example, James Phillips Kay’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, published the same year, makes inconsistent and idiosyncratic use of statistics, and the first issue of the Journal of the Statistical Society of Londonm 1838 describes the goal of statistics as simply the assembling of ‘Facts’, rather than as a set of methodologies or approaches.² By the 1840s and 50s, by contrast, statistical data would be presented strategically, to encourage the drawing of conclusions or the proving of a particular point – organized by age or profession, or in order of ascending mortality rate, for instance. One of the chief innovations of mid-century statistics lay in its move away from actual, countable persons and toward an abstraction of data into percentages and hypothetical populations of 100 or 1,000.³ In this regard, these 1832 returns recall their antecedents, the official census reports of previous decades and the Bills of Mortality of previous centuries, which simply recorded numbers of bodies. But these returns also venture in the direction of epidemiological analysis, tracking differences in the outbreak’s duration, rates of illness and rates of recovery, and thus anticipate the intertwined histories of the statistical sciences and public health in Victorian Britain.

In spite of their relative simplicity, there are nonetheless patterns and potential arguments that emerge from these numbers that would have invited readers to further study. For example, most areas were affected during the warmer months, May through October, suggesting that temperature might increase choleras virulence or human susceptibility in some way. Outliers like Houghton-Le-Spring, Berwick North, and Lancaster experienced cholera earlier than most, in the early months of 1832 or even in the late months of 1831; how might the coastal location of these towns be related to the period of onset? Would moisture or cold sea breezes have rendered inhabitants more susceptible (as many doctors and laypersons held), or might cholera be entering England through shipping routes? Further, a number of localities witnessed unusually high recovery rates; were there treatment strategies, quarantining measures or local sanitary arrangements that these areas might have in common?

In other respects, the relative uniformity of these tables also raises a number of questions. For instance, who was responsible for making the diagnosis of cholera in these cases or for verifying cause of death? What symptoms and criteria were used to define the disease’s onset, and was there agreement across all regions about these? Concerns about such local variances would be raised as sanitary reform gained momentum, and would be addressed in part by the centralizing impulse of the public health movement.

Scottish towns were designated with an ‘N.B.’ for North Britain, while data for Ireland were included en masse at the end, in red ink, with no geographical distinctions between cities or districts.

Notes

1. M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• General Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• I. Disease and Sanitary Causes
• II. The Emergence of Public Health
• III. The Extension of Sanitary Reform and Governing Bodies
• Editorial Notes