Death and Survival in Urban Britain: Disease, Pollution and Environment, 1800-1950

Description

The narratives of disease, hygiene, developments in medicine and the growth of urban environments are fundamental to the discipline of modern history. Here, the eminent urban historian Bill Luckin re-introduces a body of work which, published together for the first time, along with new material and contextualizing notes, marks the beginning of this important strand of historiography. Luckin charts the spread of cholera, fever and the 'everyday' (but frequently deadly) infections that afflicted the inhabitants of London and its 'new manufacturing districts' between the 1830s and the end of the nineteenth century. A second part - 'Pollution and the Ills of Urban-Industrialism' - concentrates on the water and 'smoke' problems and the ways in which they came to be perceived, defined and finally brought under a degree of control. Death and Survival in Urban Britain explores the layered and interacting narratives within the framework of the urban revolution that transformed British society between 1800 and 1950.

Bill Luckin is Professor of History at the University of Bolton, UK, and the co-editor of the "Social History of Medicine" journal.

This well-written and engaging book steers the reader through the epidemio-logical and environmental terrain of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both in terms of contemporaries' conceptions of the causes of disease and their amelioration, and how the historian problematises morbidity and mortality in urban Britain. It reproduces in one body Luckin's work at an accessible price. * Family and Community History *