Victorian Plague Town: Quarantines, Hospitals, and the Political Birth of Isolation
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
1-1-2018
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract
By the end of the nineteenth century, the infectious disease hospital was an indispensable institution in British public health practice. This, however, was by no means certain or natural, given the difficult and ambiguous place of the hospital in a medical and political culture generally wary of doctrines of contagion and theories of medical police reminiscent of outmoded, politically unacceptable pest-houses and quarantines. This chapter traces the role of the London Fever Hospital in problematizing and then reassessing contagion as a medical and governmental problem. Among the key figures here are Thomas Southwood Smith and George Buchanan. The “isolation hospital” was birthed only after it could be viewed as an instrument for positive government of urban space and thus separated from the quarantinist model of negative exclusion and eradication.
Chapter of
Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London
Editor
Matthew L. Newsom Kerr
Recommended Citation
Newsom Kerr, M. L. (2018). Victorian Plague Town: Quarantines, Hospitals, and the Political Birth of Isolation. In Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London (pp. 31–82). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65768-4_2
