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When and how did public health become modern? In Governing Systems, Tom Crook offers a fresh answer to this question through an examination of Victorian and Edwardian England, long considered one of the critical birthplaces of modern public health. This birth, Crook argues, should be located not in the rise of professional expertise or a centralized bureacratic state, but in the contested formation and functioning of multiple systems, both human and material, administrative and technological. Theoretically ambitious but empirically grounded, Governing Systems will be of interest to historians of modern public health and modern Britain, as well as to anyone interested in the complex gestation of the governmental dimensions of modernity.
Price: $95.00
Pages: 408
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Berkeley Series in British Studies
Publication Date:
14 June 2016
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520290341
Format: Hardcover
"The value of the book lies in its impressive command of detail."
"Crook has done much... [his] fine book gives me hope that historians will come back to (or, more properly, discover for the first time) a kind of research immensely important to the understanding of the present and the recent past, and long neglected."
"This book should inspire a good debate in the urban history and the public health subfield over Crook’s argument for a revolutionary discourse of systems."
"Crook presents a sophisticated new interpretation of the English route to modernity... this is a very stimulating book that takes a series of traditional urban history debates and casts them in a very different light, both renaming and re-thinking many of the old problems."
"Tom Crook has produced something of a tour de force, finding an original take on a subject already much traversed by accomplished scholars such as Anne Hardy and Christopher Hamlin. The result is a pleasure to read: the writing lyrical and lucid, and the text moving easily between theoretical frames and rich empirical exposition."
"A fascinating proposal of how to study technological systems in the nineteenth century."
Tom Crook is Lecturer in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. In Search of Hygeia: Systems, Modernity, and Public Health
2. A Perfect Chaos: Centralization and the Struggle for National System
3. Numbers, Norms, and Opinions: Death and the Measurement of Progress
4. Officialism: The Art and Practice of Sanitary Inspection
5. Matter in Its Right Place: Technology and the Building of Waste Disposal Systems
6. Stamping Out: Logistics, Risk, and Infectious Diseases
7. Personal Hygiene: Cleanliness, Class, and the Habitual Self
8. Conclusion: Systems, Variations, Politics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. In Search of Hygeia: Systems, Modernity, and Public Health
2. A Perfect Chaos: Centralization and the Struggle for National System
3. Numbers, Norms, and Opinions: Death and the Measurement of Progress
4. Officialism: The Art and Practice of Sanitary Inspection
5. Matter in Its Right Place: Technology and the Building of Waste Disposal Systems
6. Stamping Out: Logistics, Risk, and Infectious Diseases
7. Personal Hygiene: Cleanliness, Class, and the Habitual Self
8. Conclusion: Systems, Variations, Politics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index