Microbial metaphors: teaching ‘familiar science’ at a Kent sanatorium, c.1905–1930

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the ways in which education functioned as a core tenet of the anti-tuberculosis (TB) movement in early twentieth-century Britain. Education can be seen to have taken on a unique role in the therapeutic regimes for TB from the late 1880s with Robert Philips’s Edinburgh Dispensary system. The focus on the ‘social management’ of the disease, however, continued to evolve throughout this period as it interacted with a broad and varied landscape of therapeutic provision for TB. By looking at the case of the Post Office Sanatorium Society (POSS), this article brings to light the ways in which themes of working-class sociability, respectability and autonomy created and sustained a unique system of therapeutic pedagogy for the tuberculous worker. Such pedagogy was emblematic of what Melanie Keene has termed ‘familiar science’, a mode of scientific education with its origins in early nineteenth-century educational practice.