Bacteriology in the Service of Sanitation: The Factory Environment and the Regulation of Industrial Anthrax in Late-Victorian Britain

Abstract

Historians have largely moved away from any simple notion of a late-nineteenth century bacteriological revolution. Increasingly they characterise the ways in which older, sanitarian, public-health approaches and newer, laboratory-based, germ-theoretic approaches to disease co-existed. A re-examination of the public life of industrial anthrax in Britain in the decades around 1900 reveals the persistence of a number of sanitarian themes. Bradford—the centre of the world's wool industry—was the testing ground for early regulation designed to combat the disease. Factory inspectors and other public officials, many unfamiliar with the biology of anthrax, assimilated local efforts to remove dirt and dust from industry into national legislation, largely ignoring the presence of the causative organism, Bacillus anthracis, and its highly resilient spores. Anthrax, it is argued here, had an important social role: beyond the confines of the laboratory, it was at the centre of a continuing sanitary approach to disease prevention.

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