Public Health for the People: The Use of Exhibition and Performance to Stage the “Sanitary Idea” in Victorian Britain (2005)
Partridge, Amy Ruth (Author)
Northwestern University
Davis, Tracy C.
Edition Details: Advisor: Davis, Tracy C.
Physical Details: 339 pp.
Language: English
This project examines Victorian efforts to "diffuse sanitary knowledge to the people," including the foundation of a national museum of hygiene in London in 1871, the establishment of free health lecture series, and the distribution of thousands of "homely" tracts throughout Britain. Exhibitions of hygienic household appliances, lecture-demonstrations on the best methods of securing household health, and tracts which sanitarians read aloud in working-class homes, offered detailed instruction in housekeeping and personal hygiene. These forms of diffusion represented a change in the goals and methods of the Victorian public health movement from large-scale municipal projects to "self- instruction" in the quotidian practices that constituted an hygienic habitus. In their efforts to disseminate Edwin Chadwick's "sanitary idea," these curators, lecturers, and home visitors ultimately taught their working-class audiences to become their "own medical officers of health," initiating them into what Michel Foucault terms the "imperative of health." I assess the use of performance by public officials, medical professionals, and philanthropists to effect a wholesale transformation in "the personal habits of the people." Staging events that were designed to instruct audiences in new ways of seeing and experiencing their immediate surroundings, bodies, and place in the social order, sanitarians sought to inculcate hygienic sensibilities and structures of feeling and to transform their audiences into model sanitarian subjects. Their performances represent the on-the-ground techniques through which the Victorian discourse of public health became incarnate in the bodies of "the people." Their success in elaborating an emergent regime of knowledge and articulating it to a whole way of being is evident in the widespread adoption of a hygienic habitus. Recuperating these "sites of diffusion" to the historical record foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the shift from a regime of sanitary science to one of social medicine; expert knowledge, once the domain of the professional sanitarian, became "indispensable" to the conscientious housewife. An historical ethnographic method renders visible the processes through which an emergent discourse becomes incarnate as the common sense categories that historical actors use to structure experience.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/06 (2005): 2363. UMI pub. no. 3177790.
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