The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Diseases and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856-1900 - Hardcover

Hardy, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198203772 ISBN 13: 9780198203773

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1993

Synopsis

Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the many infectious diseases--whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis--in Victorian society. Hardy explores factors which helped to reduce fatality, focusing particularly on preventive medicine, and on the local and domestic circumstances affecting the diseases' behavior. This is a significant contribution to the historical debate that arose from Thomas McKeown's theory of modern population growth.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Hardy is at Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.

From the Back Cover

The Epidemic Streets represents a major advance in the historical study of death and disease in the nineteenth century. Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the behaviour of the infectious diseases in the Victorian city. Whooping cough and measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis ravaged millions of families and made life desperately uncertain a hundred years ago; today they have almost ceased to trouble the developed world. Dr Hardy explores the factors which helped to reduce their fatality, focusing particularly on the role of preventive medicine, and on the local and domestic circumstances which affected the behaviour of the different diseases. This is a significant contribution to the historical debate that arose from Thomas McKeown's theory of modern population growth, and it also extends our understanding of the ways in which Victorian society - both lay and medical - coped with the problems of endemic and epidemic infectious disease.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198203772
• ISBN 13: 9780198203773
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338