‘I should have thought that Wales was a wet part of the world’: Drought, rural communities and public health, 1870-1914

From 1884 onwards, Britain experienced a series of major droughts, which reached their peak in the ‘Long Drought’ (1890-1909). Despite being imagined as a wet part of the world, rural Wales was hard hit as many communities did not have access to reliable water supplies. As medical officers of health and newspapers talked about water famines, alarm focused on questions of purity and disease as drought was presented as a serious health risk. Using rural Wales as a case study, this essay explores vulnerabilities to water scarcity during periods of drought to examine the material and socio-political impact of water scarcity and the resulting public health problems faced in rural areas. In addressing how droughts in rural communities were physical and social phenomena that generated considerable alarm about infectious disease, this essay also reveals how periods of water scarcity were an important determinant in improvements to rural water provision

Vitriol in the Taff: River pollution, industrial waste, and the politics of control in late nineteenth-century rural Wales

Claims that rural communities and rural authorities in Wales were backwards conceal not only growing sensitivity to industrial river pollution, but also their active efforts to regulate the region’s rivers. This article uses evidence from South Wales to explore rural responses to industrial river pollution and to provide the micro-contextualization essential for understanding how environmental nuisances were tackled around sites of pollution. Efforts to limit industrial effluent at both local and regional levels highlight strategies of control, the difficulties of intervention at the boundaries of authorities, and how rural authorities were not always peripheral to an urban metropole. This lack of passivity challenges the idea that river pollution interventions merely displaced rather than confronted the problem of pollution, providing insights into how rural authorities worked, and into how those living in rural communities turned to them to clean-up their environment

A flat past? History, environment, topography, and medicine

This article uses topography to explore connections between environmental and medical perspectives in France between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from rural public hygiene, it addresses how physical and human geography in rural environments affected health and medicine, raising questions about how the topography of a landscape influenced medical responses to the environment. Rather than returning to the idea of the environment as a constraint on possible paths in History, it re-examines the health connotations of the French countryside before turning to the lesser-known terrain of how a locale’s topography informed efforts to regulate the relationship between medicine, society, and nature. The article argues that greater sensitivity to how people were influenced by the nature of local topographies helps historians think in different ways about embodied local geographies and their role in medicin

‘In constant fear of some dire epidemic breaking out’: Rural responses to infectious and epidemic disease, 1870–1920

Based on extensive archival research encompassing over eighty rural authorities in Wales, this essay pieces together fragmentary evidence to reveal the main contours of rural responses to infectious outbreaks from the 1870s to the 1918/10 influenza pandemic. At the centre of the essay are those practical, short-term measures that have hitherto been overlooked in the historiography. While infectious outbreaks did have the capacity to extend sanitary initiatives over the medium and long term, looking at how rural authorities reacted to infectious disease helps us better understand how public health practices translated into action at a local level. In doing so, the essay untangles both the nature of rural responses and the challenges confronted by rural sanitary officials when confronted with infectious outbreaks and how they had to adapt public health orthodoxy to different rural environments

'It might not be a nuisance in a country cottage': Sanitary conditions and images of health in Victorian rural Wales

Although historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a 'long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease' in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment

To Stamp Out “So Terrible a Malady”: Bovine Tuberculosis and Tuberculin Testing in Britain, 1890–1939

In the early-twentieth century, moves to prevent infection from tuberculosis became an integral part of local government public health schemes. While the scale of action was dependent on individual authorities and ratepayers, interest was not limited to the pulmonary form of the disease. Effort was also directed at tackling bovine tuberculosis, which by the 1890s had become “the most important disease of cows” and, with its zoonotic properties accepted, “a substantial risk to the … consumer”. With meat and milk identified as the main vectors, moves to detect infected livestock and limit the spread of the disease became part of a wider preventive strategy. Measures were introduced to control the sale of tuberculous meat and milk. Eradication schemes were promoted, as concern merged with a growing interest in food safety and agriculture, and became caught up with debates on national efficiency, farming and child health