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

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.