Performing State Medicine During its 'Frustrating' Years: Epidemiology and Bacteriology at the Local Government Board, 1870-1900

This article is about the performance—referring to the projection and reception—of state medicine in late Victorian Britain. Moving away from the lens of the ideas and policies historians have previously explored, I focus on epidemiological and bacteriological investigations of typhoid fever as they were conducted through the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, during the period historian Roy MacLeod characterised as a ‘frustrating’ one in the history of state medicine. The article focuses on two late Victorian epidemiological investigations, Richard Thorne Thorne's 1879 study of an outbreak of typhoid fever at Caterham, and H. Timbrell Bulstrode's 1896 study of an outbreak of typhoid fever at Chichester, to demonstrate the complex ways that epidemiology was constructed and defended vis-à-vis the emergence of laboratory science during the so-called Bacteriological Revolution.
Source: Social History of Medicine - Category: History of Medicine Authors: Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research