Public Health and Public Hygiene: The Urban Environment in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Abstract Both Gustave von Aschenbach and Dr Bernard Rieux would have known exactly what was meant by public hygiene, and how its breakdown might have disastrous consequences for public health, consequences that were initially disguised by administrative inaction, even duplicity. But in the late twentieth century it is all too easy to take for granted that those conditions which cost Aschenbach his life and the lives of many of Rieux’s friends have been banished once and for all. We now assume that our piped water supply is not contaminated; that sewage is effectively removed from our homes and treated; that food and drink are not adulterated; that streets are paved, lighted, and cleaned. While some people in some places at some times are not able to make these assumptions, for most of us in the industrialized countries at least these elements of environmental quality are guaranteed. The same could not be said of any period before the First World War. Indeed, it would seem that, for many, the rise of great cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant deteriorating public hygiene. The securing of public health through public hygiene represents a long and complicated story in which many individuals, organizations, and institutions pllayed prominent roles. Not only is it difficult to see who is responsible for what, but the entire contribution of public hygiene, in relation to other advances, is still open to question.

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