The epidemic streets : infectious disease and the rise of preventive medicine, 1856-1900

This is the first full scholarly history of how Victorian society coped with infectious diseases. Whooping cough and measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis ravaged millions of families and made life desperately uncertain. Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the behaviour of the infectious diseases in the Victorian city. The Epidemic Streets represents a major advance in the historical study of death and disease in the nineteenth century.