‘The Law of The Board of Health’? Rhetoric, Failure and Public Health in the English Periphery, C.1848–1875

Abstract

Scant attention has been paid to public health in small, peripheral towns between 1848 and 1875, often because it elicited little physical or infrastructural effect in these places. Drawing on recent scholarship of the New Poor Law, this article argues that public health in this period was important in establishing a uniform rhetorical register, administrative process and a ‘public health thinking’. Statute and regulation were used to constrain local authorities’ alternatives, citizens adopted the register in complaint, and gained a new understanding of their rights to health. It argues that while public health did fail in this period, its lexicographical progress enabled the relative achievements post-1875.