Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT To understand disease we must go beyond the individual doctor-patient relationship, go beyond science and technology, and enter into sociology, economics, and political science. All these factors come together in the concept of public health. This concept, that illness involves not merely the individual but society as a whole, did not find ready acceptance in the 19th century. The history of public health tells us how the attempts to change the milieu met, and sometimes overcame, obstacles. Improvement came about only through much trial and error, confusion and dispute, and conflict of interests. It was enormously difficult to identify the responsible factors and equally difficult to convince the public to do anything in the way of change.Endangered Lives gives us a rich cross-section of such public health problems as they affected Great Britain in the last two thirds of the 19th century—the period associated with Queen Victoria. Professor Wohl