Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was
insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most
prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There was a palpable
public anxiety about the disease in the Victorian era, no doubt fueled
by media coverage of major outbreaks across the nation, but also because
Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of the disease in 1861.
Their son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted and nearly
succumbed to typhoid a decade later in 1871.
The Filth Disease shows that typhoid was at the center of a number of
critical debates about health, science, and governance. Victorian public
health reformers, the book argues, working in central and local
government, framed typhoid as the most pressing public health problem in
order to persuade local officials to implement sanitary infrastructure
to prevent the spread of disease. In this period British epidemiologists
uncovered how typhoid is spread via food and water supplies, disrupting
the longstanding idea that typhoid was spread via filth. In the process
the modern disciple of epidemiology emerged as the chief science of
public health. Typhoid was as much a social and political problem as it
was a scientific one, and The Filth Disease provides a striking reminder
of the cultural context in which infectious diseases strike populations
and how scientists study them.
JACOB STEERE-WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of History at the College
of Charleston.