Typhoid in Uppingham:

Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–7

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Nigel Richardson

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

After the Public Heath Acts of 1872 and 1875, British local authorities bore statutory obligations to carry out sanitary improvements. Richardson explores public health strategy and central-local government relations during the mid-nineteenth-century, using the experience of Uppingham, England, as a micro-historical case study. Uppingham is a small (and unusually well-documented) market town which contains a boarding school. Despite legal changes enforcing sanitary reform, the town was hit three times by typhoid in 1875–6.

Richardson examines the conduct of those involved in town and school, the economic dependence of the former on the latter, and the opposition to higher rates to pay for sanitary improvement by a local ratepayer ‘shopocracy’. He compares the sanitary state of the community with others nearby, and Uppingham School with comparable schools of that era. Improvement was often determined by business considerations rather than medical judgements, and local personalities and events frequently drove national policy in practice.

This study illuminates wider themes in Victorian public medicine, including the difficulty of diagnosing typhoid before breakthroughs in bacteriological research, the problems local officialdom faced in implementing reform, and the length of time it took London ideas and practice to filter into rural areas.

Readership

History of Medicine, Social History, Nineteenth-Century Studies

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Town and School, 1875
Chapter 2: Local Society and Local Government
Chapter 3: Local Medicine and Local Doctors
Chapter 4: Typhoid: The First Two Outbreaks
Chapter 5: Winter 1875–6
Chapter 6: Spring 1876
Chapter 7: Summer 1876
Chapter 8: Autumn, Winter, Spring 1876
Conclusion

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