“Private Vices, Public Benefits”: Self-interest and Salutogenesis in Early Modern York

Abstract

On the example of York in a comparative perspective with London, this chapter challenges the standard narratives of urban improvement in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain as driven by the advancing medical knowledge. As the country was undergoing rapid industrialization, successive cholera epidemics showed the inability of civic authorities to address the quality of water supply or provide adequate hospital services. In the case of York, an important center of medical research, these realities contradicted the salubrious image of the city as the “social capital of the north” publicized by contemporary maps and views. Just as industrial pollution pointed to a conflict between private interests and public benefits, so grand architectural schemes often masked instances of corruption and profiteering, while the medical establishment was reluctant to tarnish the city’s reputation as a fashionable holiday resort. In this situation, good health remained a privilege of the wealthy until the second half of the nineteenth century, when new legislation created a basis for widescale administrative and social reforms.