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The politics of public health in modern democracies concerns the balance between rights and responsibilities. This equilibrium of citizenship is under perpetual negotiation, but it was particularly intense in mid-nineteenth-century Britain when public health became deeply embedded as a state practice. Using extensive archival research, Intrusive Interventions examines the contested realm ofVictorian liberal subjectivity through an interconnected group of policies: infectious disease reporting, domestic quarantine, mandatory removal to isolation hospital, contact tracing, and the disinfection of homes and belongings. These techniques of infectious disease surveillance eventually became one of the most powerful and controversial set of tools in modern public health. One of the crucial questions for liberal democracies has been how the state relates to the private family in shaping duties, responsibilities, rights, and needs. Intrusive Interventions argues that thegaze of public health was retrained onto everyday behaviors and demonstrates that infectious disease surveillance attempted to govern through the agency of family and through the concept of domesticity. This fresh interpretation of public health practice during the Victorian and Edwardian periods complements studies that have examined domestic visiting, the infant welfare movement, child protection, and school welfare. Graham Mooney is an assistant professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University

For nine weeks during the 1866 cholera epidemic, the registrar general for England and Wales published details of more than 13,000 deaths in London. Although the names of the deceased and the informant were withheld, all other information available from the death certificate was reproduced in the capital city'sWeekly Returns, including registration district and subdistrict, precise address (house number and street, or institution), sex, age (sometimes down to hours for infants), occupation, cause(s) of death, and duration of final illness. Since historians' access to original death certificates in England and Wales is restricted, this source presents an opportunity to analyze systematically the practice of cause of death certification in the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit during a period of mortality crisis. Variability of diagnostic "depth"—that is, the listing of multiple causes and duration of final illness—is considered for three major causes: cholera, diarrhea, and respiratory tuberculosis. Deaths in workhouses and general hospitals were chronically underdocumented compared to home deaths. This finding supports the notion that the institutionalization of sickness in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a loss of the "patient narrative" and also points to the entrenchment of institutional cultures of record keeping and administration.

Visiting relatives and friends in medical institutions is a common practice in all corners of the world. People probably go into hospitals as a visitor more frequently than they do as a patient. Permeable Walls is the first book devoted to the history of hospital and asylum visiting and deflects attention from medical history's more traditionally studied constituencies, patients and doctors. Covering the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions. However, policies towards visitors have varied from outright exclusion, as in the case of some isolation hospitals in Victorian Britain, to near open access in the first Chinese missionary hospitals. Historical studies of visitors and visiting, as a result, tell us much about the changing relationship between healthcare institutions and the communities they serve. These histories are particularly relevant at a time when service providers seek ways to involve patients' representatives in healthcare decision making; to control hospital super-bugs; and to make the hospital environment accessible yet safe and secure. With the re-emergence of restricted visiting, the subject remains one of the most emotive topics in the history of institutional medicine. Adopting a wide-ranging definition of visitors, from official inquirers to family members, Permeable Walls provides an innovative perspective on hospitals and asylums historically and will interest historians of medicine, charity and governance, as well as healthcare policy-makers.

AbstractRomola Davenport's recent article is presented as a significant revision of the interpretation of the reasons for rising and then falling urban mortality in Britain in the nineteenth century put forward by Szreter and Mooney, which emphasized the importance of the politics of public health. Davenport's claims that mortality patterns c. 1830–70 were driven by a synchronized rise and fall of scarlet fever across Europe and North America, as well as in rural locations in Britain, are based on frail and inconclusive forms of evidence. The epidemiological evidence presented by Davenport in fact indicates a chronologically lagging—not leading—role for scarlet fever in contributing to the rise in urban death rates before 1850 and the subsequent fall in urban mortality after c. 1870 in Britain.

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates differently under the two types of suffrage. Taxpayer suffrage, where the right to vote and the obligation to pay local taxes are linked, encourages demands for retrenchment and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year tax cuts and savings on administration costs. Universal suffrage, where all adult residents can vote irrespective of their taxpayer status, creates demands for productive public services and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year hikes in capital spending and a reduction in current spending. ; For financial support we thank the Centre for Quantitative Economic History (CQEH) at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust (grants 044175 and 093961). ; This is the final published version. It's also available from Elsevier ScienceDirect at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272714000048#.

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates differently under the two types of suffrage. Taxpayer suffrage, where the right to vote and the obligation to pay local taxes are linked, encourages demands for retrenchment and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year tax cuts and savings on administration costs. Universal suffrage, where all adult residents can vote irrespective of their taxpayer status, creates demands for productive public services and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year hikes in capital spending and a reduction in current spending.

Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing infections of the mid-nineteenth century were gradually replaced by non-infectious causes of death. Returning, by way of conclusion, to the theme of an integration of urban and epidemiological methodologies, attention is drawn to the explanatory potential of a fully historical economy of health and disease.

Ce travail s'appuie sur les données publiées de l'enregistrement demographique pour évaluer le taux de mortalité infantile annuel pour 21 villes anglaises et 25 districts de Londres entre 1840 et 1910. Une approche géographique comparative permet de différentier les niveaux respectifs de mortalité infantile et de mettre en évidence des cycles courts de ces variations. Si les facteurs locaux ont leur importance (croissance urbaine, conditions sanitaires du moment, méthodes nutritionnelles et qualité du lait mise sur le marché) en matière de mortalité infantile, la concordance observée entre les tendances suggère par son synchronisme que l'ensemble du système urbain était sensible à des influences communes. Les auteurs insistent tout particulièrement sur le role cônjoint du climat et de conditions sanitaires lamentables.

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902–1914) and universal suffrage (1921–1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates differently under the two types of suffrage. Taxpayer suffrage, where the right to vote and the obligation to pay local taxes are linked, encourages demands for retrenchment and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year tax cuts and savings on administration costs. Universal suffrage, where all adult residents can vote irrespective of their taxpayer status, creates demands for productive public services and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year hikes in capital spending and a reduction in current spending.