Kerr, Matthew L. Newsom (Author)
University of Southern California
Levine, Philippa
Edition Details: Advisor: Levine, Philippa
Physical Details: 575 pp.
Language: English
Fevered Metropolis examines the history of nineteenth-century London's "smallpox and fever hospitals" within a broad social and cultural context. It explores the Victorian discourse about contagion and the widely perceived spatial relationships between urbanism and the body. Segregation of the sick from the healthy constitutes an important practice largely neglected by medical history, despite being one of the primary responses to epidemic diseases in the pre-antibiotic age. Especially for Victorian Britain, the infectious disease isolation hospitals occupy a unique place from which to illustrate how metropolitan society saw and experienced the fear of contagion and the anxieties over its containment. The London Fever Hospital, a charitable institution for infectious patients, negotiated the capricious philanthropic environment of late Victorian London by exploiting perceptions of contamination in the domestic sphere. It eventually evolved into an exclusive hospital for paying members of the middle class---one of the first of the kind---but also created a new source of stress upon the meanings of charity and public responsibility for community health. A much larger municipal network of "infectious asylums" under the Metropolitan Asylums Board arose in the 1870s out of a perceived need to remove the afflicted poor from epidemiologically explosive slums. Debates that raged over urban isolation provided a focal point for prevalent Victorian discourses about urban modernity, the most important of which were those relating to the rituals of social distancing and the culture of visual display and spectatorship. Isolation fit within a panoply of concerns about private concealment, public exposure, and official representation. For the local state, epidemic hospitals played a crucial role in disease surveillance and control, but for most Londoners they also facilitated the literal and imaginative mapping of the contagious geography of the city. Fevered Metropolis draws upon a wide variety of medical and popular sources, including records created by hospital administrators, physicians, nurses, and patients; health authority minutes and papers of medical officers; newspaper accounts; government investigations and reports; trial and inquiry testimonies; and proceedings of activist organizations.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/05 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3262682.
Similar Citations
Article
Waddington, Keir;
(2002)
Mayhem and Medical Students: Image, Conduct, and Control in the Victorian and Edwardian London Teaching Hospital
(/isis/citation/CBB000200022/)
Article
Marston, Adrian;
(2007)
The Stathams of Stone and Islington
(/isis/citation/CBB000831623/)
Article
Nunes, Everardo Duarte;
(2012)
Henry Mayhew: jornalista, investigador social e precursor da pesquisa qualitativa
(/isis/citation/CBB001420604/)
Article
Henrique, Márcio Couto;
(2012)
Escravos no purgatório: o leprosário do Tucunduba (Pará, século XIX)
(/isis/citation/CBB001420625/)
Chapter
Jones, Claire L.;
(2021)
Septic subjects: infection control and occupational illness in British hospitals, c. 1870-1970
(/isis/citation/CBB137592806/)
Book
Lancaster, Brian;
(2001)
The “Croydon Case”: Dirty Old Town to Model Town: The Making of the Croydon Board of Health and the Croydon Typhoid Epidemic of 1852-3
(/isis/citation/CBB000771195/)
Article
Condrau, Flurin;
Worboys, Michael;
(2007)
Second Opinions: Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB000930681/)
Article
Read, Ian;
(2012)
A Triumphant Decline? Tetanus among Slaves and Freeborn in Brazil
(/isis/citation/CBB001420623/)
Article
Tullo, Ellen;
(2010)
Plague of Icy Breath. Cholera and the Gateshead Community 1831--1832
(/isis/citation/CBB001220542/)
Chapter
Cresswell, Rosemary;
(2021)
Constructing the 'Sanitary Officer': the Pathologist's role in infection prevention and control at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, 1892-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB902385607/)
Article
Álvarez, Adriana;
(2010)
La experiencia de ser un 'niño débil y enfermo' lejos de su hogar: el caso del Asilo Marítimo, Mar del Plata (1893--1920)
(/isis/citation/CBB001420440/)
Book
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul;
Löwy, Ilana;
(2001)
Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission
(/isis/citation/CBB000101679/)
Article
Anderson, Stuart;
(2007)
“A Proper Person to Officiate”: Apothecaries at Westminster Hospital, London---1716 to 1826
(/isis/citation/CBB000850020/)
Book
Heaman, Elsbeth;
(2003)
St. Mary's: The History of a London Teaching Hospital
(/isis/citation/CBB000771234/)
Article
Noymer, Andrew;
Jarosz, Beth;
(2008)
Causes of Death in Nineteenth-Century New England: The Dominance of Infectious Disease
(/isis/citation/CBB000930682/)
Article
Luca Borghi;
Anna Marchetti;
(2018)
Introducing the Trained and Educated Gentlewoman into the Wards of a Children’s Hospital. The Role of Charles West, M.D. (1816-1898) in the Rise of Pediatric Nursing
(/isis/citation/CBB103892653/)
Article
Haynes, D. M.;
(2000)
Framing tropical disease in London: Patrick Manson, Filaria perstans, and the Uganda sleeping sickness epidemic, 1891-1902
(/isis/citation/CBB000111779/)
Book
Toni Sirena;
(2021)
La Falcadina ovvero la sifilide degli innocenti
(/isis/citation/CBB908678831/)
Article
Wall, Rosemary;
(2011)
Using Bacteriology in Elite Hospital Practice: London and Cambridge, 1880--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001210683/)
Article
Luca Borghi;
(2017)
When Human Touch Makes the Difference. The Legacy of Charles West (1816-1898), Pediatrics Pioneer
(/isis/citation/CBB582501959/)
Be the first to comment!