Abstract
During the 1980s and 1990s advocates of a social history of medicine argued that it should focus on the history of health. They underlined how, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, the sick poor child ‘needs … not medicine, but … better clothes, better food, and a better drained … house’.1 Although partisans of this new approach coined the term the medical marketplace, it has, ironically, led historians away from this inclusive agenda, encouraging them to concentrate on the ‘doctor—patient relationship’.2 Furthermore, through its assimilation to the historiography of consumerism and economic expansion, the medical marketplace model has inclined scholars to write about premodern medicine with reference to affluence and advertising rather than discussing health and its relationship to deprivation, diet and the necessities of life.
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Notes
D. H. Laurence & D. J. Leary eds, Bernard Shaw: The Complete Prefaces Volume 1: 1889–1913 (1993), 355. This broader literature included S. Szreter, ‘The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mortality Decline c. 1850–1914: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Public Health’, SHM, 1 (1988);
A. Hardy, The Epidemic Streets (Oxford, 1993); P. Slack, ‘Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England’, SHM, 5 (1992);
M. Pelling & R. M. Smith eds, Life, Death and the Elderly (1991).
E.g., J. Walter & R. Schofield eds, Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989).
On this, e.g., R. D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie, 2nd edn (Boulder, 1994).
The Courier (10 April 1827), 1; New Times (10 April 1827). Cf. R. Murdie, A Second Judgement of Babylon the Great, 2 vols (1829), i, 6–7.
Johnson had worked in, and published on, India, M. Harrison, Public Health in British India (Cambridge, 1994), 41–8.
D. E. Lipschutz, ‘The Water Question in London, 1827–1831’, BHM, 42 (1968), 518.
A. Hardy, ‘Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, MH, 28 (1984), 260; Lipschutz, ‘Water Question’, 524.
E.g., T. Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed., L. M. Knapp (Oxford, 1966), 120.
B. Luckin, Pollution and Control (Bristol, 1986), 12–14.
On the senses and pollution, S. Mosley, The Chimney of the World (Cambridge, 2001), intro. and ch. 1; P. Macnaghten &
J. Urry, Contested Natures (1998), ch. 4.
Wright, Dolphin, 41. See also, G. Smeeton, Doings in London (1828), 110–13.
On Weale’s employment, TNA, LRRO2/26, pp. 56, 132, 244 & 376. Weale subsequently worked as a surveyor in Ireland, R. J. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (New York, 1995), 25–6.
L. Schwarz, ‘London, 1700–1840’, in P. Clark ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II (Cambridge, 2000), 650. The population in 1821 had reached 1,247,000.
J. D. Graham-Leigh, ‘The Transformation of London’s Water Supply, 1805–1821’ (M.Phil. thesis, Open University, 1984), 36–7.
B. Rudden, The New River (Oxford, 1985), 140, 308; J. Graham-Leigh, London’s Water Wars (2000), 49.
F. H. W. Sheppard, Local Government in St. Marylebone 1688–1835 (1958), 193–9; Hansard, 38 (1818), 31. The companies were willing to accept this.
M Wright, Dolphin, 95; Hansard, 37 (1818), 1184. On water in Lauderdale’s theory of value, M. Paglin, Malthus and Lauderdale (New York, 1961), 44–45.
E. Hawkins, ‘Authors of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin’, Notes and Queries, ist ser., 3 (1851); G. Stones ed., Parodies of the Romantic Age, 5 vols (1999), I, pp. lii, 155n.
G. H. D. Cole, Life of William Cobbett (1924), 224; G. Spater, William Cobbett (Cambridge, 1982), 170–2, 252–4, 427–8.
R. Harris, ‘Political Economy, Interest Groups, Legal Institutions, and the Repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825’, EcHR, 50 (1997); E. Thomas, ‘The Crisis of 1825’ (M.A. thesis, University of London, 1938).
I. Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992), esp. ch. 5.
See, J. Wright, A Biographical Memoir of… William Huskisson (1831), iii.
R. M. Kerrison, A Letter to … Robert Peel … on the Supply of Water to the Metropolis (1828), 18.
Smeeton, Doings, 105–13. It attributed the tea’s condition to the East India Company’s monopoly. See also, G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 91–7.
Commons Journals, 73 (1818), 153. On these campaigns, P. Matthias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), 228–51;
B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, Rev. edn (Keele, 1994), ch. 3; Searle, Morality and the Market, 240–4.
M. Daunton, ‘The Material Politics of Natural Monopoly: Consuming Gas in Victorian England’, in M. Daunton & M. Hiltoneds, The Politics of Consumption (Oxford, 2001), 87.
T. L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies (1998).
P. E. Carroll, ‘Medical Police and the History of Public Health’, MH, 46 (2002). There are parallels between these debates over water and earlier debates about whether the grain trade ought to be a matter of police, I. Hont & M. Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: an Introductory Essay’, in I. Hont & M. Ignatieff ed., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge, 1983), 13–26.
See also A. Gambles, Protection and Politics (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1999), 26–36.
E.g., R. Dodd, Observations on Water (1805), 8–10 & 17–8.
D. Eastwood, ‘Tories and Markets: Britain 1800–1850’, in M. Bevir & F. Trentmaneds, Markets in Historical Contexts (Cambridge, 2004); Gambles, Protection and Politics.
E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Gt. Britain, ed., M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh, 1965), 145; P. Schwarz, ‘John Stuart Mill and Laissez Faire: London Water’, Economica, 33 (1966);
J. Taylor, ‘Business in Pictures: Representations of Railway Enterprise in the Satirical Press in Britain 1845–1870’, P&P, 189 (2005), 143–4;
F. Trentmann and V. Taylor, ‘From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London’, in F. Trentmann ed., The Making of the Consumer (Oxford, 2006).
J. Houghton, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, 224 (13 November 1696).
See also, M. S. R. Jenner, ‘From Conduit Community to Commercial Network? Water in London, 1500–1725’, in P. Griffiths & M. S. R. Jenner, Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000), 260–64.
On trust and water companies, M. S. R. Jenner, ‘L’Eau Changée en Argent? La Vente de L’Eau dans les Villes Anglaises au Temps de L’Eau Rare’, XVIIe Siècle, 55 (2003); V. Strang, The Meaning of Water (Oxford, 2004).
More generally, M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966).
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Jenner, M.S.R. (2007). Monopoly, Markets and Public Health: Pollution and Commerce in the History of London Water 1780–1830. In: Jenner, M.S.R., Wallis, P. (eds) Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_11
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