Governing Systems

Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910

Tom Crook

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780520290358
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520964549
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

When and how did public health become modern? In Governing Systems, Tom Crook offers a fresh answer to this question through an examination of Victorian and Edwardian England, long considered one of the critical birthplaces of modern public health. This birth, Crook argues, should be located not in the rise of professional expertise or a centralized bureacratic state, but in the contested formation and functioning of multiple systems, both human and material, administrative and technological. Theoretically ambitious but empirically grounded, Governing Systems will be of interest to historians of modern public health and modern Britain, as well as to anyone interested in the complex gestation of the governmental dimensions of modernity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. In Search of Hygeia: Systems, Modernity, and Public Health
• 2. A Perfect Chaos: Centralization and the Struggle for National System
• 3. Numbers, Norms, and Opinions: Death and the Measurement of Progress
• 4. Officialism: The Art and Practice of Sanitary Inspection
• 5. Matter in Its Right Place: Technology and the Building of Waste Disposal Systems
• 6. Stamping Out: Logistics, Risk, and Infectious Diseases
• 7. Personal Hygiene: Cleanliness, Class, and the Habitual Self
• 8. Conclusion: Systems, Variations, Politics
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index