BOOK REVIEW: Christopher Hamlin.PUBLIC HEALTH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF CHADWICK: BRITAIN, 1800-1854. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Abstract

Revisionist histories of nineteenth-century political institutions, administrative organizations, public welfare, profession development, policing . . . Where will it all end? Revisionism, a phase in writing about any theme of continuing contemporary curiosity, has now reached the subject of nineteenth-century urban drainage. Christopher Hamlin, in his engagingly written new book, has set out to explore and reinterpret, without benefit of hindsight, the half-century of debates out of which emerged a central government commitment to the regulation of "public health." The key figure in the orthodox narrative of the making of modern English sanitation, as all recall, is Edwin (from 1889 Sir Edwin) Chadwick (1800-90). Love him as a tireless and shamefully betrayed public servant, or hate him as an arrogant and out-of-place "Prussian minister," Chadwick stands at the center of the sanitary science epic, and Hamlin has no wish to dislodge him from this position. What he does set out to demonstrate is that Chadwick's career in public health was, quite literally, a literary construct, the result not of any remarkable scientific insight (within a twentieth-century understanding of the term) but of an epically tenacious political will to impose "the greatest 'technical fix' in history" (13).