scholarly journals ‘Cleanse or Die’: British Naval Hygiene in the Age of Steam, 1840–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Juzda Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health Movement ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Hygiene Practices ◽  
Environmental Controls ◽  
Causes Of Disease ◽  
Public Health Movement

This article focuses on the consolidation of naval hygiene practices during the Victorian era, a period of profound medical change that coincided with the fleet’s transition from sail to steam. The ironclads of the mid- to late- nineteenth century offered ample opportunities to improve preventive medicine at sea, and surgeons capitalised on new steam technologies to provide cleaner, dryer, and airier surroundings below decks. Such efforts reflected the sanitarian idealism of naval medicine in this period, inherited from the eighteenth-century pioneers of the discipline. Yet, despite the scientific thrust of Victorian naval medicine, with its emphasis on collecting measurements and collating statistics, consensus about the causes of disease eluded practitioners. It proved almost impossible to eradicate sickness at sea, and the enclosed nature of naval vessels showed the limitations – rather than the promise – of attempting to enforce absolute environmental controls. Nonetheless, sanitarian ideology prevailed throughout the steam age, and the hygienic reforms enacted throughout the fleet showed some of the same successes that attended the public health movement on land. It was thus despite shifting ideas about disease and new methods of investigation that naval medicine remained wedded to its sanitarian roots until the close of the nineteenth century.

Controlling contagion? Watercress, regulation and the Hackney typhoid outbreak of 1903

Rural History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Rebecca Ford
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Water Supply ◽  
Horticultural Crop ◽  
The Public ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Health Movement ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Rural Context ◽  
Public Health Movement

Abstract The part played by the public health movement in controlling epidemics in urban areas has received considerable attention from historians, as has the regulation of the milk and meat industries that commenced in the late nineteenth century. However, comparatively little work has been carried out on health in a rural context – and the role played by the horticultural sector in the spread of contagious diseases has barely been covered. Yet, as this article shows, it was a sector that had the potential to produce potent contaminants. By examining histories of the production of one horticultural crop, watercress, it reveals how issues around the provision of a clean urban water supply and idealised imaginings of the countryside as a pure space, played a part in exacerbating the extent of outbreaks of typhoid in the industrial city. It also shows that there was governmental reluctance to regulate an industry that grew a staple product, even when growers themselves were keen for guidance.

scholarly journals IL SIGNIFICATO DEL BICENTENARIO. COME UNA CONCLUSIONE

2013 ◽  
pp. 175-178
Author(s):  
Giorgio Pestelli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Drama ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The meaning of the bicentenary that solemnizes Verdi and Wagner two hundred years after their birth essentially derives from the emotion of facing two personalities extraordinary for their creative energy and inventive continuity. In all fields of art and culture, the late Nineteenth century image is conditioned by their presence. Born the very same year, they both looked for and created by themselves the accomplishments that musicians of the previous generation already possessed when they were barely twenty years old. They reached almost at the same time both the revelation of their personality (Der fliegende Holländer 1841, Nabucco 1842), and the fullness of their artistic means (Rigoletto 1851, Der Rheingold 1853), before attaining the acme of their trajectory with the astonishing operosity of their final years.While the analogy of this parallel course is impressive, the individuality of their creative patrimony is no less strong. This dissimilarity – more than on aesthetic or dramaturgic reasons, such as the distinction between naif and sentimental, or between “melodrama” and “musical drama” – rests on the different environments where it took root, each of them with its own alternative ideas of bourgeois society, of relationship with the public, the contemporary theatre and literature: that’s why it is important today to engage to enlighten the cultural and social contexts in which the genius of the two masters developed.

Return to the Wilberforce–Huxley Debate

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Vernon Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Scientist ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historic City ◽  
Insight Into

One hundred and twenty-eight years ago in the historic city of Oxford a relatively brief impromptu verbal exchange at a scientific convention occurred. It is still vividly remembered in and out of academia. This so-called ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and the young scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley, a simple and concrete episode, has continued to symbolize dramatically the complex and abstract phenomenon of the conflict between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. while that symbol may be somewhat inaccurate, or its relevance may have shifted from a century ago, it still is a powerful image, one which continues to be an important part of the religious, scientific and rhetorical history of the late Victorian era. Moore recently wrote: ‘No battle of the nineteenth century, save Waterloo, is better known.’ It is, as Altholz put it, ‘one of those historical events the substance and significance of which are clear, but whose specifics are decidedly fuzzy around the edges.’ It is the purpose of this paper to present a full and balanced view of the specific ingredients, permitting a better insight into the event's symbolism and significance.

scholarly journals The Meat City: urban space and provision in industrial Copenhagen, 1880–1914

Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

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