A Sewer is the best medicine: Through plague, wars, famine and flood: Sir Robert Rawlinson and the nineteenth century public health revolution (2022)
J. Andrew Charles (Author)
Bannister Publications
Physical Details: 299
Language: English
When in 1848 Rawlinson was appointed a superintending inspector by the General Board of Health ‘He communed with himself and he found that he was profoundly ignorant of everything connected with sanitary science, but he thought that, the duty being once imposed upon him, he should be false to all his principles if he did not, with every power that nature had endowed him with, strive to master the subject that he might not disappoint those who had recommended him to the post'. Doubtless such thoughts were influenced by his upbringing when, in his early years, Robert was taught by his father to be unassuming and modest; ‘to be silent, and allow them to find out my merits, if I had any’. Certainly his concern about causing disappointment was quite unnecessary and Lord Shaftesbury, one of the three Public Health Act Commissioners, described Rawlinson’s work for the Board in the following terms: ‘for diligence and activity, knowledge and zeal, - not merely professional zeal, but influenced by deeply moral and humane feelings – he was unsurpassed’. In days when there was much opposition to the extension of the powers of the state, Rawlinson saw that a civilised way of life with a nation composed of ‘healthy, religious, honest and truthful citizens’ required appropriate legislation including sanitary laws and regulations. ‘There can be no such thing as entire independence in a civilised country. Where there are several houses near each other, or villages, or towns, there must be mutual action for the good of the whole. … This brings us to the right of a State to enact sanitary laws.’ On his retirement in 1887, the British Medical Journal expressed the hope that Rawlinson would write down his recollections so that the ‘present generation’ would understand ‘how potent were the forces of self-interest, carelessness, and inertia with which our early sanitary pioneers had to contend.’ Although he alluded to these matters in many letters and articles, Rawlinson never wrote the sort of account of his experiences that the BMJ had in mind and, somewhat belatedly, this book attempts to remedy this omission. (Publisher)
...MoreReview Nina Baker (2022) Review of "A Sewer is the best medicine: Through plague, wars, famine and flood: Sir Robert Rawlinson and the nineteenth century public health revolution". International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology (pp. 74-76).
Similar Citations
Book
íguez-Ocaña, Esteban Rodr;
(2002)
The Politics of the Healthy Life: An International Perspective
Book
Nigel Richardson;
(2008)
Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877
Article
Stark, James F.;
(2012)
Bacteriology in the Service of Sanitation: The Factory Environment and the Regulation of Industrial Anthrax in Late-Victorian Britain
Book
Campkin, Ben;
Cox, Rosie;
(2007)
Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination
Article
Hamlin, Christopher;
(2005)
Sanitary Policing and the Local State, 1873--1874: A Statistical Study of English and Welsh Towns
Article
Brown, Michael;
(2008)
From Foetid Air to Filth: The Cultural Transformation of British Epidemiological Thought, ca. 1780--1848
Book
Jacob Steere-Williams;
(2020)
The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England
Article
Crook, Tom;
(2007)
Sanitary Inspection and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: A Case Study in Liberal Governance
Book
Allen-Emerson, Michelle;
Choi, Tina Young;
Hamlin, Christopher;
(2012)
Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain
Book
Schneider, Daniel;
(2011)
Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem
Book
Kelley, Victoria;
(2010)
Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain
Book
Hardy, Anne;
(2001)
Health and Medicine in Britain Since 1860
Article
Hanley, James G.;
(2002)
The Public's Reaction to Public Health: Petitions Submitted to Parliament, 1847--1848
Book
Allen, Michelle Elizabeth;
(2008)
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London
Article
Hurren, Elizabeth T.;
(2005)
Poor Law versus Public Health: Diphtheria, Sanitary Reform, and the “Crusade” against Outdoor Relief, 1870--1900
Article
Mills, Dennis;
(2009)
Public Health, Environment and Surveying
Thesis
Partridge, Amy Ruth;
(2005)
Public Health for the People: The Use of Exhibition and Performance to Stagethe “Sanitary Idea” in Victorian Britain
Article
Labna Fernandez Erana;
(2025)
Keeping the house clean: Women and germ theories in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain
Chapter
Melling, Joseph;
Sellers, Christopher;
(2012)
Objective Collectives? Transnationalism and “Invisible College”s in Occupational and Environmental Health from Collis to Selikoff
Book
Jackson, Mark;
(2007)
Health and the Modern Home
Be the first to comment!