Mapping the Social Body and the History of Medicine in Victorian England, 1832-1866
FAIN: FT-47022-02
Pamela K. Gilbert
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL 32611-0001)
No project description available
Media Coverage
Review of Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Review)
Author(s): Brian Rasmusssen
Publication: Victorian Studies
Date: 11/11/2005
Abstract: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/victorian_studies/v047/47.4rasmussen.html
Associated Products
Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Book)Title: Mapping the Victorian Social Body
Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Abstract: The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. Tracing the development of cholera mapping from the early sanitary period to the later "medical" period of which John Snow's work was a key example, the book explores how maps of cholera outbreaks, residents' responses to those maps, and the novels of Charles Dickens, who drew heavily on this material, contributed to an emerging vision of London as a metropolis. The book then turns to India, the metropole's colonial other and the perceived source of the disease. In India, the book argues, imperial politics took cholera mapping in a wholly different direction and contributed to Britons' perceptions of Indian space as quite different from that of home. The book concludes by tracing the persistence of Victorian themes in current discourse, particularly in terms of the identification of large cities with cancerous growth and of Africa with AIDS.
Year: 2004
Primary URL:
http://lccn.loc.gov/2003055013Publisher: SUNY Press
Type: Single author monograph
Cholera and nation : doctoring the social body in Victorian England (Book)Title: Cholera and nation : doctoring the social body in Victorian England
Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Abstract: Drawing from sermons, novels, newspaper editorials, poetry, medical texts, and the writings of social activists, Cholera and Nation explores how the coming of the cholera epidemics during a period of intense political reform in Britain set the terms by which the social body would be defined. In part by historical accident, epidemic disease and especially cholera became foundational to the understanding of the social body. As the healthy body was closely tied to a particular vision of nation and modernity, the unhealthy body was proportionately racialized and othered. In turn, epidemic disease could not be separated from issues of social responsibility, political management, and economic unrest, which perpetually threatened the nation and its identity. For the rest of the century, the emergent field of public health would be central to the British national imaginary, defining the nation's civilization and modernity by its sanitary progress.
Year: 2008
Primary URL:
http://lccn.loc.gov/2007014883Publisher: SUNY Press
Type: Single author monograph