The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England

by Dr Jacob Steere-Williams

Shows how the investigation of local outbreaks of typhoid fever in Victorian Britain led to the emergence of the modern discipline of epidemiology as the leading science of public health

Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There was a palpable public anxiety aboutthe disease in the Victorian era, no doubt fueled by media coverage of major outbreaks across the nation, but also because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of the disease in 1861. Their son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted and nearly succumbed to typhoid a decade later in 1871.

The Filth Disease shows that typhoid was at the center of a number of critical debates about health, science, and governance. Victorian public health reformers, the book argues, working in central and local government, framed typhoid as the most pressing public health problem in order to persuade local officials to implement sanitary infrastructure to prevent the spread of disease. In this period British epidemiologists uncovered how typhoid is spread via food and water supplies, disrupting the longstanding idea that typhoid was spread via filth. In the process the modern disciple of epidemiology emerged as the chief science of public health. Typhoid was as much a social and political problem as it was a scientific one, and The Filth Disease provides a striking reminder of the cultural context in which infectious diseases strike populations and how scientists study them.

340 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2020

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "The Filth Disease" Steere-Williams outlines the various approaches Victorian epidemiologists took in tracking and understanding typhoid in nineteenth century Britain. By looking at the various theories and approaches around the spread of typhoid (sewer-gas, water, milk-borne, and bacteria), Steere-Williams complicates notions around the inherent "progress" of scientists and epidemiologists around understanding disease. Throughout the text, Steere-Williams traces how typhoid as a disease was understood culturally, moving from a disease of mainly the urban poor (prior to the mid-nineteenth century) to a disease that heavily impacted middle-class and rural households. Steere-Williams concludes the book looking at typhoid outbreaks in the tropics to demonstrate how Victorians perceived (or did not perceive) typhoid as imperial (and thus transnational) disease.