The legislative story of British public health reform has often been told; but the moral mission to cleanse and save the nation emerged from a whole penumbra of health reformers stretching far beyond the public façade of Sanitarianism. They included the many millions of silent consumers whose private health care arrangements were already making their contribution to the new health industries—and to demographic statistics. In nineteenth-century Europe the average population growth rate was roughly 60–70 per cent; but in Britain the growth rate was nearer a staggering 140 per cent (from c.15.5 million in 1801 to 41.4 million by 1901). Town dwellers were 20 per cent of the UK population in 1801, 54 per cent in 1851, 80 per cent by 1901.1 In 1800 European public health philosophy was enlightened but barely off the drawing board; but the immediate problem facing Britain as its population grew so rapidly was the looming question of long-term health investment, above and beyond the norm. Who was going to pay for the necessary bricks and mortar, and water supplies? Ever since 1688, political pragmatism had ruled in British affairs. Legislation was tentative at first; but in the end the utilitarian (or mercantilist) economic arguments were decisive. No public investment—no sanitation, no cleansing, no civilizing process, no trade.
The Whigs represented the liberal elite of the eighteenth-century aristocracy and mercantile classes, who were very well placed to witness destitution on their own lands. They took an early lead. The red-leather, gold-tooled volumes of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Improving the Comforts of the Poor (SBCICP, 1790) were reports from scores of small local charities devoted to welfare relief, job creation experiments, and educational schemes operated by benevolent landowners. The first three pieces of health legislation in which early reformers were involved at the beginning of the century—the first national Census (1801), the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (1802), and the National Vaccine Establishment (1808)—neatly represent the three main engines behind future policy-making: statistics, applied science, and pure science. But education was the mantra of early nineteenth-century reformers. The long-running Society for the Reformation of Manners had been superseded by a wave of midto late eighteenth-century morality, and education had become the preserve of religious evangelical women reformers (notably Hannah More) via the enormously popular late eighteenth-century Sunday School movement, which laid great stress on clean dress, clean skin, good manners, and moral obedience. The rapid development of religious tract societies gave a further excuse for large numbers of charitable middle- and upper-class women to go among the poor and ‘witness’ their unclean homes and habits.2 At this stage the health debate was firmly circumscribed by voluntarism, or charitable philanthropy; the principle of voluntarism was built into most of the nineteenth-century British legislation that enabled—but did not absolutely require—specific environmental improvements (such as baths, parks, and public toilets), leaving their actual provision to public philanthropists, or voluntary associations of ratepayers.3
But Whig views on individual rights of laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property still ruled in the early nineteenth century, and the SBCICP looked backwards for its models. It had begun a long and inconclusive debate on the provision of ‘houses of recovery’ reminiscent of the times of the plague, that would quarantine and clean infected or dirty people and their houses; and when Dr Christopher Stanger, a European émigré, published Remarks on the Necessity and Means of Suppressing Contagious fever, on the desirability of establishing permanent local health committees and a more comprehensive medical police, he was politely ignored. His progressive measures not only included regular inspection of the local housing, streets, cellars, and the supervision of nuisances, burials, and all public buildings; but also extended to eliminating Window Tax, providing open-air recreation, and teaching habits of personal cleanliness—specifically, the use of fresh air, frictions, washing, and warm bathing. The idea of houses of recovery was dismissed as useless:
Without such domestic regulations, enforced by a vigorous police, for promoting cleanliness and ventilation in the dwellings of the poor, Contagious Fever, tho’ greatly diminished, cannot be effectually suppressed by the removal of the sick, and purification of their cloaths, furniture, and apartments.
He went on to suggest a plan for public baths and wash-houses:
Cleanliness might also be greatly promoted by supplying water in abundance in the districts of the poor, and by erecting baths, which they might use without trouble and expense… workhouses… more especially ought to contain baths for the benefit of their inhabitants, and of all the indigent parishioners. They might also contain machines and employ paupers, capable of working, in cleansing many articles of dress and furniture belonging to the poor, gratuitously, or at a trifling expense… Where the total sum of private philanthropy is insufficient, parliament will, unquestionably, assist in completing the benevolent plan.4
All of Stanger’s suggestions were carried out by later generations of reformers.
‘The poor’, however, were not content to wait for charity to trickle fitfully into their communities; and some of them were starting to take matters into their own hands. In a revolutionary spirit the young merchant Robert Owen (1771–1858) had built a much-visited and talked-about utopian factory community at New Lanark; and in A New View of Society (1813) had described the cottages, and all the sanitary conveniences and built-in recreational pursuits, that would serve as the future model for humane and health-conscious ‘Villages of Co-operation’. Thirty years later he found himself the hero of a new generation of working-class cooperative trading experimenters, and thereafter wrote, lectured, toured, and preached for a rational New World of socialism brought about by the ‘construction of a great social and moral machine, calculated to produce wealth, knowledge, and happiness, with unprecedented precision and rapidity’.5 After 1830 Owenite gatherings in small villages and large towns were often the places where working-class reformers first saw the light, as part of a personal philosophical journey.
The sectarian religious revival of the nineteenth century was a ferment that had worked its way through every aspect of working-class life, reopening many old wounds. One of them was the old Protestant democratic argument with the medical faculty over the rights to medical knowledge and self-medication, and rights of control over one’s own body—particularly the puritanical control over the body as the path to self-enlightenment. The multidimensional, universalist, and markedly utopian aims of pure-spirited health reform were typified by the masthead of The People (1848), a small magazine dedicated to ‘Phrenology, Teetotalism, Theological Reform, Dietetics …and all that contributes to the free and full development of the whole human being and of the whole human family’.6 In 1852 a journalist, Samuel Brown, coined the phrase ‘Physical Puritanism’:
A new sort of puritanism has arisen in our times, and its influence is as extensive as its origin is various. In some of its features it is as ancient as history, in others as modern as yesterday, and in all not inexpressive of certain of the wants and aspirations of society. It is the puritanism of the body; but the common purpose of all its manifestations is the healing, cleansing, and restoration of the animal man.7
The most active physical puritans (according to Brown) were the vegetarians, hydropaths, mesmerists, phrenologists, teetotallers, homoeopaths, and popular physiologists. But the dense mass of medical ‘irregulars’ that accumulated over the course of the century also included the old herbalists (medical botanists), bone-setters (chiropractors and osteopaths), occulists and aurists, the spiritualists, anti-vaccinationists, anti-vivisectionists, animal rights activists, Christian Socialists, Christian Scientists, and many other minor health-conscious sects and morally inspired associations.
One historian has described nineteenth-century plebeian science as ‘the problematic of imponderables’—an open-ended science combining a sense of holistic wonder with a Baconian sense of limitless natural possibilities.8 Essentially they shared the same self-taught, eighteenth-century Aristotelian-Baconian-mechanistic physiology, underpinned by puritanism, and overlaid with transcendental vitalism. Their staunch empiricism encouraged craft cooperation and made space for the older manual arts; which was why bone-setting, for example, could be aligned with mesmerism; or why the animal magnetists, with their touching, ‘hands-on’ methods of healing, seem to have been associated with a revival of manual frictions—especially spinal frictions—which led to the late-century revival of massage therapy.9 It is very difficult—probably impossible—to say how many fellow-travellers there actually were in the active health reform movements, though the medical botanists and the Temperance Leagues were already claiming tens of thousands of followers in the 1820s and 1830s; while the great outpouring of British health magazines in the first half of the century shows clearly how the physical puritans grew in public confidence and momentum, reaching a peak of enthusiasm in the 1840s and 1850s.10
The transcendental vegetarians and the medical herbalists were the true political heirs of seventeenth-century medical dissent. Both believed in inner cleanliness in the ancient sense of ingesting ‘clean’ foods and drinking pure drinks (and had no trouble in adding outer cleansing to their list of reforms). Vegetarianism was cocooned within Dissent—almost any ascetic sectarian was a potential convert. Methodism, for example, did not make vegetarianism a religious issue, but tacitly supported it; it was also subliminal in Quakerism, and in many of the Anabaptist-derived and other European sects in America. It had also found a powerful new prophet in the works of the eighteenth-century evangelical spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose millenarian vision of a New Church of faith, love, and vegetable innocence leading to a New Jerusalem was laid down in his spirit-inspired Arcana Coelestia (1747–58). Swedenborgianism was transplanted to the London Church of New Jerusalem in the 1780s (possibly attended by the artists William Blake and Joseph Turner), and then to northern England, where it became the basis of a cooperative vegetarian movement, the Bible Christians. The Bible Christians crossed the Atlantic in 1817 with a congregation from Yorkshire whose leader, William Metcalfe, founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. Joseph Brotherton, former pastor to the Salford Chapel of Bible Christians, chaired the inaugural meeting of the English Vegetarian Society in 1847.11
Samuel Hahnemann’s homoeopathy, when it arrived, with its tinctures and essences, was a very refined version of the vegetable healing mission. In Britain homoeopathy’s main feature was the early and dramatic conversion of large numbers of aristocrats and royalty, patrons of its fashionable hospitals. But it, too, could find a foothold within the broad church of democratic herbalism.12 Nineteenth-century herbal democrats not only believed in treatment with herbs, they violently opposed ‘unnatural’ mineral medicines, emphasized hygiene, and actively distrusted all doctors. The old international Protestant networks had become immensely active during this time of high migration, and nineteenth-century cooperative Protestantism was a powerful force in the revival of Anglo-American physical puritanism. During the 1820s the American self-taught healer Samuel Thomson founded groups of Thomsonian ‘medical botanists’ in both America and northern Britain, dedicated to the use of pure vegetable medicines, indigenous natural herbal remedies, and the use of God’s own water, fresh air, and exercise—a popularized version of Wesley’s Primitive Physic.13 The next Thomsonian American evangelist, Dr Isaiah Coffin, who settled in Leeds in the 1840s, added temperance and antialcohol teetotalism to the cause, and set up a network of botanic agents and medical ‘friendly societies’ which trained a new generation of empiric, working-class ‘medical botanists’ with their own herbal casework, drawings, collections, clubs, conferences, and publications. Eventually the herbalists became part of a moderated ‘eclectic’ medical reform movement (which carefully argued the right to choose ‘any remedial agent irrespective of origin or class of medical practitioner’) and fought hard to be registered under the Medical Act of 1858 (they failed).14
The emotional and spiritual appeal of vegetarian purity was kept alive in England by the utopian socialists. The famous Ham Common ‘Concordium’ communal retreat in London, founded by James Pierrepont Greaves (‘Apostle Greaves’), was a vegetarian showcase and a reformers’ meeting-place in the 1840s. Greaves believed in the transcendental Creative Power of the universe, and thought of himself as a scientific socialist in the manner of the contemporary French socialist Charles Fourier, whose socialist theories of the progressive stages of civilization occupied the same intellectual space as the old Protestant Adamites: mankind was progressing from Edenism, Savagery, Patriarchy, and Barbarism, to Civilization, Cooperation, and Association. The Concordium, of course, was the model for harmonious cooperation, and was designed to create ‘the true practical socialist’ in ‘buildings cheerful, light, and spacious’, with ‘harmonic industrial occupations’, ‘intellectual and scientific pursuits’, and a strict vegetarian and cold-bath regime, uncut beards, open sandals, and ‘pervious and flowing Cotton garments undyed’. Greaves’s Pythagorean emphasis on purity also involved celibacy: married couples were not allowed within the inner circle at the Concordium, only Platonic ‘Unions of affectionate and intelligently adapted natures’; or, more perfectly, ‘Unions of Spirits of selected pairs in sympathetical harmony with LOVE’.15
The few issues of the New Age and Concordium Gazette (1843–4) were full of American abstracts and news. In nineteenth-century America, health reform ‘rang with the rhetoric of democracy’. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the prophet of the Transcendentalists of New England, while the hygienists Sylvester Graham and William Alcott famously travelled up and down the east coast of America during the 1830s and 1840s promoting temperance leagues, temperance hotels, vegetarian dining rooms, and vegetarian products. But the argument remained a spiritual one on both sides of the Atlantic. Bronson Alcott’s honorary address to a Ham Common Concordium gala in 1842 spoke for them all: ‘Our trust is in purity not vengeance. Together with pure beings will come pure habits. A better body shall be built up from the orchard and the garden… flesh and blood we will reject as the accursed thing. A pure mind has no faith in them.’16
16 Early socialist hygiene c.1840—the theory of ‘Conditional Law’ laid out for James Pierrepoint Greaves’s utopian vegetarian commune.
Radical physical puritans may have been a tiny minority, but public scepticism in Britain about ‘regular’ therapeutics was reinforced by the four epidemics of cholera (1831–2, 1848–9, 1853–4, and 1866–7). The first epidemic in particular caused great public anxiety, and was met by considerable legislative confusion over the activities of the (temporary) local boards of health; John Snow’s definitive reports on water transmission were published in 1849–55.17 Cholera also highlighted the deficiencies of nineteenth-century Galenic therapeutics—especially the new wave of ‘heroic’ bloodletting promoted by the French vitalist physiologist F. J. V. Broussais (1772–1838). What was particularly worrying was that the favourite drugs were useless, and bloodletting patently did not work—the blood in cholera victims was far too thick and tarry. The experience of trying to bleed in cholera, it was noticed, had ‘shattered the faith of many believers’.18 Many young doctors nevertheless still relied firmly on drugs and the scalpel. The commercial market for drugs had grown enormously. Drugs were now available over the counter ready for self-dosing—powerful medicines ‘which, under a great variety of seducing forms and titles, are constantly employed’. Laudanum (opium), calomel (mercury), antimony (arsenic), and the bark (aspirin) were the main stocks-in-trade, but new chemical laboratories in the 1820s and 1830s were just starting to produce the new chemical alkaloids—the active therapeutic agents in natural drugs such as quinine, codeine, caffeine, and cocaine.19
Many university-trained doctors, on both sides of the Atlantic, thought the profession was on the wrong track, and floundering. Like the disillusioned Dr William Dale, they saw popular and professional quackery flourishing everywhere throughout the ‘Upas Tree’ of medicine, bringing down the rotting apples of ‘Confusion’, ‘Disappointment’, and ‘Ruin’.20 Thomas Wakely’s London magazine The Lancet was founded in 1823 to stimulate professional reform on all fronts. For progressive doctors, reducing the use of drugs and reinstating hygiene as a branch of regular medicine seemed to be the only way out of this professional impasse; but this also required retraining the medical profession itself (as Thomas Beddoes had noted thirty years earlier). Hygiene was not yet on either the British or the American medical curriculum. The health author Andrew Combe complained that ‘foreign universities’ had chairs of hygiene, but ‘there is scarcely a medical school in the country in which any special provision is made for teaching it’. (Edwin Chadwick had to go to Paris in the 1820s in order to take a course on medical police.) In Britain, Combe lamented, ‘both the teacher and student fix upon [cure] as their chief object; and are consequently apt to overlook… the laws of health. [The medical man] works it out for himself; but in general attains it later than he ought to do, and seldom so completely as he would have done had it been made a part of his elementary education.’ Another doctor remarked bitterly that when it came to prescribing hygiene, most doctors seemed to ‘despise the subject, or think that it forms no necessary part of his professional lore’. If someone asked them about prevention, they ‘immediately put the person down as a hypochondriac’ and refused to have anything to do with ‘the twaddling maxims of old women … But who else is so better qualified?… If hygiene is now despicable in the eyes of the Physician, he has himself to blame for her state; for he left her in bad company, where she has been seduced and corrupted.’21
Health reformers from both sides of the professional fence moved instinctively into the new cheaper magazine market to reach a new mass audience of urbanites apparently desperate for all forms of self-help information. The term ‘popular physiology’ described a type of middle-of-the-road health philosophy that required no severe ascetic practices, had no membership requirements, and excluded no one. ‘Popular physiology’ was the new title, but the modern works fitted seamlessly into the old genre of health handbooks. The burst of middle-class 3d. to 1 s. monthly health magazines shows how successful these large, slim, well-decorated publications were; when bound at the end of their run, with additional illustrations, they also made a handsome health encyclopedia.22 Magazines such as The Family Oracle of Health; Economy, Medicine, and Good Living; Adapted to All Ranks of Society, from the Palace to the Cottage (1824–6) give a strong impression of popular health concerns. The Oracle was a jolly little publication, full of wise-cracking jokes which carefully trod the professional middle way, its main aim being to moderate drug-taking and promote self-help and personal hygiene in its broadest sense. It was packed with small, easy-to-read essays, and was calendrical—always starting with ‘Problems of the Month’:
Diseases of August; Hydrophobia or water-fear; Philosophy of Bathing, No. 2; Poultry buying; Pimples; Art of Medical Training, No. 1; Training adapted to Ladies; Beauty training; Ruined constitutions; Indigestion; Diseases of the unmarried state (green sickness); Cock a leeky soup; Mrs Pringle—quack; Philosophy of the Hour, No. 4; Hereditary dunces and Borough Jobbery.
Diseases of September; Fever; Sauces; Indigestion; Effects of Drugging on Beauty; Coughs and consumptions; Typhus fever; Weak moving; Venison and grain; Art of Medical Training No. 2; Choosing spectacles; School diseases from school vices; Evils of boarding schools exposed…Examination of food, exercise, etc. in 11 fashionable schools; Economical elder wine; The Philosophy of Hearing…23
One major innovation in popular physiology was the teaching of ‘popular anatomy’. Dr Andrew Combe’s best-seller The Principles of Physiology Applied to the Preservation of Health, and the Improvement of Physical and Mental Education (1833) went into five editions in three years (with American, German, and French editions). It combined a moderate vitalist regimen with simple anatomy (describing in detail the structures and functions of the skin, muscles, bones, lungs, and nervous system). By the late 1840s, readers of domestic medicine could marvel at the microscopic anatomy of the skin, and thrill to the functions of the insensible perspiration:
…I counted the perspiratory pores in the palm of the hand, and found 3528 in a square inch. Now each of these pores being an aperture of a little tube about a quarter of an inch long, it follows that … there exists a length of tube equal to 882 inches, or 73 and a half feet. Surely such an amount of drainage as 73 feet every square inch of skin … is something wonderful, and the thought naturally intrudes itself—what if this drainage were obstructed? The number of square inches of surface in a man of ordinary height and bulk is 2,500; the number of pores therefore is 300,000 and the number of inches of perspiratory tube 1,750,000, that is 145,833 feet, or 48,600 yards, or nearly 28 miles … from this explanation the necessity and value of cleanliness to health must be self-evident.24
In Combe exercise was now firmly linked to mental training—‘the physiology of mind as well as body’; Combe’s brother was George Combe, whose Constitution of Man (1828) imported the controversial and astonishingly popular mental ‘phrenology’ of Franz Joseph Gall and J. C. Spurzheim, which linked the brain’s organic structure to its mental powers (diagnosed through bumps on the skull).25 The principles of hygiene had long been used to treat the unbalanced passions of the insane, the hysteric, or the depressed; it was only another short step to apply the principle of mens sana in corpore sano to stressed-out urban civilians.
From the 1830s onwards, middle-class families faced a barrage of indoctrination on the subject of sober, temperate personal hygiene—now often called the ‘economic’ life; fewer drugs and less food (the ‘economic’ diet); leanness instead of corpulency; training instead of relaxation; mental and physical fitness. As always, obesity problems were closely connected with rising standards of living, and the message was the same: ‘If exercise conduces to throw off all superfluities in the system, temperance in diet prevents their accumulation and renders it less necessary; if exercise cleans the vessels, temperance neither satiates nor overstrains them.’ People were exhorted to plan regular daily patterns of physical exercise. Swimming, walking, and other sports were already well established; but the great craze in the 1820s and 1830s was gymnastics (or ‘callisthenics’ as it was more frequently called), which was imported into Britain and America from Per Henrik Ling’s Gymnastiska Centralinstitut in Stockholm; followed later by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s ‘Turnplatz’ (‘Turning’) equipment, with wooden beams, bars, and horses (the type of gymnastics that we now see in the Olympics) which in Germany were often situated outside in natural forest settings. Military-style outdoor gymnastic ‘drill’, which was simply brisk walking in disciplined formations, became highly popular with schoolteachers; and all gymnastic exercise routines were thought to be particularly suitable for children and women, producing a mild strength, suppleness, and graceful lines, rather than visible muscles. To start with women’s callisthenics and ‘turning’ were the hobby of the health enthusiast; but gymnastics provided the future foundation for sports in girls’ schools.26
In Britain, the popular physiologists saw exercise not only as a personal hygienic discipline but as a public hygiene requirement, which they busily and actively promoted via the so-called ‘Rational Recreation’ movement. Village sports and entertainments were dying as their populations shrank, and in the towns there was nothing to replace them, reformers argued, but the public alehouse. Rational Recreationists encouraged the building of pleasure parks, sports fields, baths, libraries, museums, and meeting halls. Local, national, and international sports leagues were developed between 1820 and 1890; and every single British county had a football league by the 1880s. Much of this popular success was to do with the acculturation of school sports. School hygiene had already been raised by popular physiologists at the beginning of the century, and organized school sports were originally conceived as rational recreation for boys. Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby in the 1840s, recognized that the discipline would be useful against the unfettered ‘vandalism’ of the boys (who were traditionally allowed to roam free in the afternoons) and allowed his masters to develop it. Rugby produced a new generation of notably athletic British public schools, with a strong ethos of ‘muscular Christianity’ that was also later exported into the American sporting college system. In 1855 Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes compared the rosy, muscular, well-fed, and large British visitors that he saw with puny, pale-faced, American youths: ‘They fill their coats vigorously, they walk more briskly… they are warm, jolly, and athletic.’27 However, popular physiology, rational recreation, and sanitary reform were all very much part of the same hygienic project. From the 1840s onwards the broad popular front of sanitary reform turned its attention to two remedies for filth that were long overdue: the provision of clean water, and cleansing public baths.
Health reform in Britain came to a head in the distressed years of the 1840s—a time of economic growth, population increase, and the return of cholera. The numbers of peripheral supporters of health reform crusades increased dramatically as a great battle for public health legislation began. During the 1840s drains, baths, and water were constant headline news: the ‘conquest of water’ was the first lesson for the newly founded sanitarian lobby. The early 1840s were dominated by Edwin Chadwick’s famous 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes, which forced the public to recognize that there truly was an urban crisis. The overcrowded poor, living in hutlike conditions unchanged over the centuries, were grossly deprived of sufficient sources of fresh water, while the rich were polluting the old public watercourses with their overflowing waste. Thanks to the mass production of water-flushed latrines, by the 1840s ‘some 250 tons of faecal matter daily found their way into the Thames’; twenty years later that fecal matter could be measured in many thousands of tons.28 As doctor after doctor in the Report described their local slums, and their rivers of sewage, people saw filth with new eyes: they suddenly noticed it everywhere, in the air, water, in the streets, on clothes and skin, in food.
From the time that the Health of Towns Commission sat between 1843 and 1846, and for years after the sanitary reformers’ Health of Towns Association was formed in 1844, a physiological picture of poverty emerged which not only deepened public concern but confirmed conditions that charity visitors had seen (and physiological reformers had suspected) for years. It was noted that deprivation had stunted growth as well as scything through the weakest bodies during epidemic attacks—the poor were some 5 inches shorter on average. Far more than the rest of the population, they suffered from multiple disabilities. Many had bent limbs from suffering rickets in a malnourished childhood, and workshop diseases and deformities were normal. Women and girls in particular were thin and small through malnourishment, with small pelvises that made childbirth more difficult and low birth weight inevitable. Because of close proximity to infected persons, open rubbish heaps, common use of all utensils, and above all lack of water, all the old skin diseases were still rife among the poor, who ‘quietly suffer the penalties annexed to the want of cleanliness, as disagreeable smells, perpetual irritation with chaps and fissures on the skin, boils, and eruptions of painful, inflamed pustules, the Itch and Prurigo, the Lepra, the dry Tetter, the running Tetter, the Dandriff, and Scald-head’. Physiology had long ago embraced vitalist doctrines of race-theory, heredity, and the diseases of civilization, and reformers could virtuously point to an easily recognizable physical type: the asthenic, the debilitated, the aetiolated poor:
the national habit of body is depreciated. Our people are etiolated; every tenth man is a pauper; every seventy-fourth is a drunkard; three generations of pauperism is producing the Negro type, without its redeeming black or brown, in some parts of Ireland; and no whole family is free from the strumulous or emasculating or morbific taint… It is clear that the national circumstances and manner of life are to blame for this dreadful result…29
Disease, minimal amounts of dry grooming, and unwashed rags and underlinen meant that the bodies of the poorest smelled intensely, with strong animal odours, compared to the washed or scented population. The very poorest were sometimes described by fearful people as ‘savages’, ‘brutes’, or ‘animals’—traditional terms describing those beyond the boundaries of society, the untouchables, the impure. Now they also became known as the ‘great unwashed’.
There had been much discussion about public baths among the mercantile utilitarians in the 1830s; and, following the model of New Lanark, various philanthropic manufacturers had set up workforce baths. Applying the new technology of steam to public baths had become an exciting project for health progressives: ‘What if this same engine, whilst it clothes the British labourer with garments as rich and as fine as those worn by the Kings of Tyre and Sidon, should likewise give him what was the next Eastern luxury and refinement—the warm bath!’ There was also an unsuccessful attempt by Rational Recreational hygienists to legislate for baths in the newly reformed Parliament in 1835, with a bill to promote ‘Public Walks, Playgrounds, Baths, and places of healthy recreation and Amusement’, with another bill for ‘Institutions for the diffusion of literary and scientific information, including Libraries and Museums, with commodious Halls and Places of Public Meeting’. But the two bills were quietly dropped in 1837; hygienic idealism bowed before empiricism, and the statisticians were given their way.30 Chadwick’s Report five years later provided a clearer and more universal focus, with ‘cleanliness’ identified as the central agent of the civilizing process.
The year 1842 was key for British health reform. It was the starting block not only for Chadwick but also for the public baths movement, both simultaneously moving in different directions. In 1842 Liverpool Corporation opened a municipal laundry or wash-house (with baths attached), which was so successful that they soon opened another one six times the size. Not to be outdone, in 1844 the City of London started a royally patronized Association for Promoting Cleanliness among the People, which quickly built a similarly successful wash-house in a slum called Glass-House Yard, followed by another in Goulston Square. The public baths reformers quickly set up a broad front, led by the reforming wing of the Anglican Church, with powerful speakers in Archdeacon Samuel Wilberforce and the bishop of London, Dr Charles Blomfield—cleanliness was so clearly a ‘moral purity’ issue. By 1845 the so-called Clean Party was well into its stride, and had set up the Association for the Establishment of Public Baths and Washhouses, which closely supervised the national legislation of 1846–7. The Act simply empowered any parish or borough to build public baths (including vapour baths) if the ratepayers voted in favour, with maximum charges (6d.) and a tiered pricing system (1d.cold bath, 2d. warm bath, children half price) to ensure that they remained poor baths. There were muted objections from commercial baths operators, and some puritanical diehards objected that the baths would be ‘gossip shops’ and ‘sinks of corruption’; but the vote was passed decisively. From then on the Act was left to fend for itself and often had a rough ride at local meetings, as in the London parish of St George’s in the East where the Dirty Party met in the pub, while the Clean Party met in the church. But in the end these poor baths proved more difficult to build and operate than foreseen; they lost money in the winter, were overcrowded in the summer, shunned during epidemics, were high-maintenance and dependent on an efficient water company, and rarely made a profit. They were only a real success after a second Act prompted a new wave of building in the 1870s.31
It is difficult to get past the liberal reformer’s top-down view of the baths-and-cleanliness movement. The equally dedicated Dirty Party was usually composed of anyone who objected to raising the rates (shopkeepers and small businessmen); or who feared increased overheads (manufacturers); or who believed that the expense would send jobs elsewhere (including Chartists and many others); or those who simply thought that dirt was a necessary sacrifice on the altar of prosperity, the price that had to be paid—‘where there was muck there was brass’. With hindsight it is remarkable how much got done at all before the civic-minded 1870s, in the face of widespread political indifference and open hostility.32 It was probably the new Labour vote after the 1832 electoral reforms that tipped the balance towards action. The Baths for the Working Classes movement in Edinburgh, for instance, was started with a petition signed by ‘2400 working men’, many of whom turned up to the inaugural meeting, and seemingly had no objection whatsoever to a shining moral vision of cleanliness. When the surgeon James Simpson referred to temperance, he was received by ‘loud and long-continued cheers’, while his ‘view of… well-built houses, sewers, water in abundance, pure air and light … [and] of better things for the working man’s dwelling, produced a strong sensation in the audience’. The chairman, Lord Dunfermline, thought that cleanliness was not only necessary for the
comfort, health, and respectability of the people, [but] I look upon it as a necessary preliminary to alliances between the working classes, and those whose province it is to inculcate religious and moral conviction on the people.—(Loud Cheers)… I have no doubt [that] we are about to carry the day—that henceforth we shall have established far more method, far more order, far more cleanliness in the domestic economy of the people.33
The religious feeling does seem to shine through: sobriety, temperance, cleanness, thrift, and respectability were sober old Calvinist virtues. It did not necessarily mean that all the labouring classes shared the same ‘soap-ori-fic’ cross-class political viewpoint. As one working-class poet warned in a burst of Jacobin satire on the general lack of moral cleanliness in high places, baths and wash-houses were ‘but a small instalment due, sir’:
… But sure the chap’s no silly ‘un,
Who to cleanliness a railroad planned
A washhouse for the million.
Chorus: Ri tooral, looral, looral, loo
Ri tooral, looral, lido
Sure purity outside and in,
Should be a people’s pride oh.
But stay—‘tis not the vulgar herd
Alone who lack a scrubbing,
We’ve great ones too who want a bath
And pretty hard dry-rubbing… …
To scour such knaves, as I have heard—
At all observe, no snarl-I-ment—
A thumping bath is being built
In the New Houses of Parliament.
Ri tooral, looral, etc….
So let us praise the general scheme,
As a small instalment due, sirs,
From wealth and rank to poverty—
And hope still more they’ll do, sirs.
Chorus: And then we’ll own, in bath and park,
That to serve your poor neighbour
A duty is—and bless the man,
Who helps the sons of Labour.
Ri tooral, looral, etc.34
From the 1840s onwards public speakers referred to ‘cleanliness’ constantly: it became a litany that few members of the public, literate or otherwise, could have avoided, or failed to have learnt. Cleanliness would make everyone happier. It would create a more disciplined workforce and save them from the demon drink. Mental and physical dispositions were linked in a strong moral polarity:
A clean, fresh, and well-ordered house [has] a direct tendency to make the members of a family sober, peaceful, and considerate of the feelings and happiness of each other… whereas a filthy, squalid, unwholesome dwelling… tends directly to make every dweller in such a hovel regardless of the feelings and happiness of each other, selfish and sensual. And the connection is obvious between the constant indulgences of appetites and passions of this class, and the formation of habits of idleness, dishonesty, debauchery, and violence.
Cleanliness kept the civilized man safely at home. The ‘rosy’ view of the beautiful clean home with its beautifully clean contents became the source of a rich ‘trope’ or type of cleanliness prose in novels and fiction, as well as campaigning journalism, directed at young women and young wives especially:
Who…has contemplated the wide difference in the aspect of everything, where the presiding spirit, the wife, is a votary of Cleanliness, and the state of things where she is not. How ill-favoured the handsomest furniture looks, covered with dust and stains—the most beautiful carpet, by crumbs and shred. On the contrary, the polished oak table, the well-rubbed floor, on which the light of heaven shines through a clear glass; the white hearth, and shining fire-irons; the bright fire, which blushes not for the ashes that lay scattered before it, but smiles because only its own clear face can be seen, render the poorest cabin an earthly paradise …35
This was a neglected and disorderly home—not a poor one. Good housekeeping was rewarded by shining oak tables and glowing Turkey carpets; an overt appeal to the consumer, that eager self-improver, and one which was used constantly by utilitarian reformers promoting ‘the engine of Trade’.
Environmental public hygiene policies were pursued in Britain in the second half of the century with grim determination, long after the baths fuss had died down. European and American cities were also starting to feel the impact of urban growth; but in Britain certain clear priorities had already emerged. The early 1850s were particularly busy years, and the national press became a major force in environmental crusading. As is well known, The Times made Florence Nightingale into a heroine when she used scrubbing brushes and cleanliness to reduce death rates at Scutari Hospital in the Crimean War of 1854. The Lancet underwrote the work of Dr Arthur Hill Hassall, who had provided the famous microscopic slides of Thames water for Chadwick in 1849–50, and who between 1851 and 1855 became The Lancet’s one-man Analytic Sanitary Commission, analysing over fifty different types of common food, naming and shaming nearly 3,000 commercial traders, and discovering ‘an amount of adulteration which certainly no person was prepared for’. Hassall virtually invented the office of the public analyst, and paved the way for the three food and drug Adulteration Acts of 1860, 1875, and 1899. In 1852 Joseph Bazalgette was appointed Surveyor to the Metropolitan Sewers, and was soon to present his master plan for sewering the whole of London, a plan which came into its own after the Great Stink of the Thames in 1858; it was completed in 1859–75, and all of its affairs were very closely monitored by the press.36
Chadwick’s successor Sir John Simon rallied the profession to hygiene, employed chemical laboratories, demanded and got trained medical officers of health, successfully created the discipline of state medicine, and put in such sterling work attempting to remove various national ‘Nuisances’ that his large raft of legislation had to be consolidated into the 1875 Public Health Act, which finally made local boards of health mandatory. Most importantly, reformers took advantage of the widening tax base of a prosperous economy, to tempt local councils into taking on low-cost loans for public works; the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act of 1863 has been pinpointed as the turning point in British civic reform. The whole task of cleansing towns was thus turned over to local government civic reformers and municipal socialists, who pushed through wide-ranging slum clearance, housing schemes, water and gas schemes, drainage and cesspit renewal schemes, with the accompanying hygienic cultural programme of public libraries, museums, parks, and baths. Private philanthropy supported these schemes and (on a lesser scale) the provision of park bandstands, public latrines, drinking fountains, and horse troughs. This was the Romanesque or monumental phase of sanitary history, when grandiose architects, designers, and their clients spent large sums of money developing the Victorian city as we know it.37 The bigger the projects, the more Roman-like were the stone tablets put up to record the munificence of the local worthies—local politicians who had rediscovered an old truth, that public health schemes brought prestige, local employment, and increased powers of patronage. Even sewage outfalls or water towers could be objects of local pride (municipal rubbish dumps, however, were not).
In 1847 Dr Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered a simple antiseptic routine using cleanliness and carbolic acid; but it was only when the surgeon Joseph Lister perfected antisepsis procedures in the 1860s, wearing white gowns and drenching everything in carbolic spray (thereby making routine operations far safer and more difficult medical conditions ‘operable’), that the public really sat up and took notice of the new ‘cellular’ microbiological sciences opening up under the guidance of Rudolf Virchow, Louis Pasteur, and Claude Bernard. Most of these advanced medical discoveries did not as yet help a great many people until the end of the century. Preventive medicine in the laboratory was barely conceivable compared to preventive hygiene in the city, and at home. Keeping well and avoiding infection seemed the only alternative to paying large medical bills or dying young. Health faddery, for those who could afford it, retained its appeal. Domestic sanitation became big business. By the 1850s many bourgeois health consumption patterns had already been framed, and were simply set to rise.
‘Comfort’ had now been added to ‘convenience’. The English house was well on the way to becoming the fully furnished, massively ornamental, thickly carpeted, heavily curtained, well-serviced, and ingeniously plumbed home which typified la luxe anglaise to Europeans, and which was displayed to international view at London’s Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851. French authors put it all down (logically) to the nasty cold climate ‘chez les peuples du Nord’, and particularly praised the control of temperature and ventilation.38 ‘Comfort’ was considered to be the happy medium between luxury and poverty. Many London houses had underground drainage and piped water as a standard convenience after the 1850s. No self-respecting Victorian could have done without his or her domestic bathing arrangements.
Sanitary habits were already changing in the 1820s and 1830s, although older, unplumbed habits died hard: ‘jerries’ and close stools (night tables) in late eighteenth-century marquetry designs still delighted nineteenth-century consumers. But whatever most people had managed in the way of grooming before, they were now expected to try just that little bit harder, as J. S. Forsyth put it (in 1829): ‘Cleanliness of person, and in all concerned with it, is a principal duty of man … It is better to wash twenty times a day than to allow a dirty spot to remain on the skin…’.39 The bath had finally ‘come to rest’ in the purpose-built bathroom—but only if space was available; strip washing in the bedroom was still the cheapest and most convenient option. Significantly, it was in the 1830s that the simple bedroom washstand started to become the much more imposing washstand table, with a wooden or tiled back and drawers underneath, holding a larger bowl, a larger jug, a soap dish, a sponge dish, tooth glass, and towel rail. Other households found that they could put a portable metal shower-bath in the corner of a bedroom, following the advice of magazines who assured their readers that ‘baths on a large and expensive scale’ were ‘by no means necessary’. Wooden portable baths, with wheels, a drain-hole, and brass fittings (and from the 1850s gas heating attached underneath), were perfect for moderately well-off clients, and had a long and honourable existence throughout the century. The cheaper painted tin baths seen in so many nineteenth-century illustrations were mass-produced from the mid-century in many different shapes and sizes: the full-length lounge bath, the shallow sponge bath, the foot- or slipper bath—and the highly popular, oval, sit-down hip or ‘Sitz’ bath, with a high back and small elbow rests also serving as soap dishes: ‘Many older persons will remember a hip bath set out in a cosy bedroom, on a waterproof bath-sheet, with the brass or copper cans gleaming in the light of a good fire, and a thick towel warming on the sideboard.’40
In wealthy upper-class families in the second half of the century, the baths were monumental, and the exotic bathrooms were large—big enough for crinolines, or even for callisthenics. Thomas Crapper made his fortune after 1866 by redesigning and supplying top-of-the-range plumbed-in products, including the now fashionable cast-iron bath-shower combination, with elaborate shower screens and metal sprays; and cast-iron pedestal washbasins, hugely ornate, with mirrors and hot and cold mixer taps. Porcelain slowly replaced metal in the fixtures and fittings and opened a new window for designers—luxuriant colours and patterns in the latter half of the century giving way to clinical white at the end of the century. John Shanks and Thomas Twyford became household names by designing porcelain valve closets, which finally trapped all smells, for their pedestal flush toilets in the 1870s. The problems of supplying hot water were partially eased by the introduction of gas geysers, from the same late-century supply that also brought new, ‘clean’, artificial gas lighting and heating. For the enthusiastic home DIYer (and, like George Grossmith’s fictional Mr Pooter, there were many of these) the era of the large domestic water boiler had just begun, and there would be many more household ‘bangs’ and disasters before it was more or less perfected.41
The toilette that accompanied the bath was now a rite of modest purity and perfection. Victorian painters and novelists put great aesthetic emphasis on the translucent ‘bloom’ of the female skin—simple ‘natural’ beauty from soap and water, with shining, well-brushed hair. Eighteenth-century cosmetic fashions were long gone. Lip paint was forbidden; eye paint should be invisible; heavy rouge was frowned on; lightly scented cold cream and a touch of powder were allowable. But only for married women: modest and virtuous girls should never ‘paint’ (though young women started to rebel at the end of the century). Instead of paint, toilet soap production rose steadily after soap duties were halved in 1834; and took off dramatically when Gladstone’s free trade policy abolished the old Soap Tax in 1852. Perfume was increasingly contained not in the bottle but in the soap. Light floral scents were preferred, and several new herbal and mineral soap odours (including peppermint, coal tar, and the antiseptically pungent Old Brown Windsor Soap) were on show in the Great Exhibition.42 Tablets of scented soap (especially new transparent soaps) became objects of desire in the Victorian middle-class home, and to lower-middle-class aspirants: country village girls still cherished their own bars of scented soap in the 1920s.
17 Edgar Dégas’s Woman in a Tub (c.1883), one of his many intimate depictions of women grooming in the bedroom. The strip wash in a shallow basin was still the simplest and cheapest method of washing for those without any plumbing.
The 1830s had seen the start of a new trend in male hairstyles: the expertly barbered moustache, longer hair, and the beginning of the Victorian cult of the beard. Like the recently reintroduced corsets and 20-inch waists for women, with enormous hooped crinolines laden with frills, flounces, and trimmings, beards and moustaches were not at all hygienic, but they were overt grooming displays. After so many centuries of being cleanshaven, what did the reappearance of beards signify? Primitive virility? (Or puritan indifference?) It does seem to be true that the more material goods later nineteenth-century Victorians possessed, the more perfectly groomed they were, the more they yearned to get back to nature. In their personal habits, and in their rich inner life, many of them were staunch Greek primitives, with the added spice of romantic vitalism. Those who could afford it returned to their primitive roots at the hydros.
The spa and seaside craze had continued unabated in the 1820s–1830s, and by 1850 the British coastline was lined with scores of small, genteel resorts, all reachable by rail; while the inland spas rapidly expanded with elegant infilling and residential development. The major seaside resorts had doubled in size; by the 1880s they had doubled or trebled again; really cheap working-class excursions came at the end of the century.43 European spas, lakes, and mountains were now also reachable by rail, and Baden-Baden, Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Wiesbaden, Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad), and Aix-les Bains became select health retreats for the upper classes. But a hydro was not a spa; it was the purists who despised the spas and spa life who first went to the hydros.
18 Ramsgate Sands, 1854, in its early heyday as a seaside resort reachable by railway and steamboat from London. Sea breezes and a view of the sea were obviously hygienic enough—only one child is going for a paddle, and none of the adults have altered their dress in any way.
In the early 1840s the first eulogies of Vincenz Priessnitz’s ‘wet-wrap’ cure in the mountains of Austria began to appear in the European press. Priessnitz was an illiterate peasant farmer from Gräfenberg who had devised a new version of ‘heroic’ cold bathing in the early 1820s, when he cured himself of the pain of four broken ribs (after resetting them himself by manipulation) by keeping cold, wet bandages constantly wrapped round his body while they healed. He then started to heal others as paying guests on his farm, using the same ‘wet-wrap’ methods along with a fierce regime of outdoor walks, outdoor showers, and a simple peasant diet. His success stung the local medical profession into a barrage of legal attacks, but his fame was sealed after the local aristocracy tried the cure, and immediately started sending their own chronic sick. You had to be very ill, or desperate, to go to Priessnitz. People were not expected to enjoy what they endured (though most seem to have found it an extraordinary and fascinating experience), but the therapy of detoxification was impressive, and moreover seemed to work. Cold water was applied in almost every way except bathing. Fierce jets of cold water, or cold outdoor ‘waterfall’ showers, were favourite stimulants for the circulatory system. Inside their daily cold-water-doused ‘wraps’ the patients quietly steamed, stimulating the kidneys to evacuate large quantities of fluids. The treatment was found particularly effective for gout, syphilis, and all those suffering from mercury poisoning—which was about half the clientele: ‘Priessnitz assured a friend of Sir Charles Scudamore that he had seen mercurial globules issue at the ends of the fingers after a long continued course of the water-cure, years after the use of mercury had been abandoned.’44 People developed muscles at Gräfenberg. It re-created peasant life with all its promise of longevity through a cure that was very like hard physical labour.
News of the water cure spread quickly and inspired many similar operators throughout Europe and America. The best sites were defunct springs or spas, on a hill or mountainside. In Ireland, Dr Richard Barter was an early convert to hydropathy (as it became known) and opened the first water cure hydro on the site of the holy well on St Anne’s Hill, in 1842. He later developed an interest in the Irish sweat lodge tradition, and ended up leading a late-century popular Turkish vapour baths movement throughout Ireland, Scotland, and England; scattered remnants of this movement can still be found in British cities. England’s first hydro on the site of an old spa in the Malvern Hills was opened in 1842–3 after a quick visit to Gräfenberg by two fashionable London doctors, James Wilson and James Manby Gully. The London literary and scientific set (Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Florence Nightingale, Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Darwin) became their loyal patients. Yet another proprietor, John Smedley, redeveloped an old spa at Matlock in Derbyshire in 1851. Smedley was a successful spinning magnate, the builder of a model factory community, a strict Methodist, and a hater of doctors, and an enthusiastic convert to hydropathy (though not to Priessnitz). Matlock was much patronized by puritanical northern industrialists like himself, and by the 1870s was the biggest hydro in Britain.45 In America hydropathy was also an immediate success. During the 1850s twenty-seven hydros were built by springs, lakes, and mountains; later hydros, such as Round-Hill Water-Cure Retreat in Northampton, Massachusetts, were based on the larger German water cure resorts, where exercise took the form of sporting play rather than gruelling work.
Women in particular flocked to the hydros whenever they could, and appreciated its unconventional freedoms. The American suffragette trousers, or ‘Bloomers’, were originally a hydropathic style. The ‘wet dress’ worn over the steaming compresses beneath was in the Turkish or oriental style—a loose-fitting tunic or coat reaching below the knees, which was worn over loose trousers gathered at the ankles. ‘Wearers usually cut their hair short for easy drying, and felt themselves emancipated from the bondage of trailing skirts, petticoats, corsets, and corkscrew curls.’ This Turkish outfit was apparently introduced into fashionable American circles by a reformer’s daughter, Elizabeth Smith, and was subsequently taken up by the feminist Amelia Bloomer, who dared to wear the trousers publicly in the street.46 These and other late-century sports clothes were the beginning of a new phase in hygienic dress reform.
On the whole, physical reformers in the last twenty or so years of the century could look back on a lot of specific achievements in the field of public hygiene, many of which had been (or were in the process of becoming) institutionalized. The key reform in Britain was obviously the capture of central and local government and the creation of an ethos of sanitary need. Municipal socialists and commercial developers were now starting to rebuild the towns through mass slum clearances, all new housing was fully plumbed and drained, and a whole cadre of doctors had moved into public health. A great deal of municipal and state effort was now also being put into adult physical fitness training, and in the new state and Church schools children were now being exercised and taught the basic rules of hygiene and popular physiology, collectively, for the first time. The Early Hours Movement released—and in part was designed to release—male and female clerks and shop assistants from their work in order to join in regular sporting activities and other rational recreations, attracting millions of people in their weekly ‘time off’. The reformers had thus succeeded in creating an ethos of personal ‘fitness’—what the philosopher William James called ‘the religion of healthy-mindedness’.47
The sporting nineteenth century ended with the triumphant Olympic Games of 1896. These international games were held as the result of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s personal crusade to reinvigorate the French race through cricket and cold baths, and to put Greek sporting ideals on a world pedestal. There seems to be a distinct possibility that Coubertin’s idea of the Olympics finally took shape in the summer of 1890, after an invitation from an English Rational Recreationalist, Dr W. P. Brookes, to visit the village of Much Wenlock in Shropshire and view their annual festival of ‘Olympic Games’, which he had started in 1849. Brookes had for years been trying to export the idea of an Olympic Games to be held at Athens, and in Coubertin he had finally found a fellow enthusiast.48 It took Coubertin four years to assemble the first International Olympic Committee of 1894, which inaugurated and organized the first worldwide festival of sport. The First Olympiad was opened in Athens in 1896, on the site of the ancient festival, and went thereafter to Paris (1900), St Louis (1904), London (1908), and Stockholm (1912), with constant fixtures (excepting 1916 and 1940) to the present day.
But even while the sanitarian and physical hygiene reforms were steadily unrolling, the last twenty years of the century were filled with urgent social anxieties, uncertainties that had arisen directly from the onslaught of late nineteenth-century science. Not only had the Darwinian evolution debate raised unwelcome atheistic thoughts; but equally worryingly, the still-popular, if fading, Aristotelian-Galenic scientific paradigm was being fatally attacked and undermined by the rise of bacteriology and microbiological medicine from c.1880 onwards. Professional science had never been the monolith that radicals liked to think. If there was a problem interpreting the natural world, it had always been a communal one—and nothing was more communal than germ theory.49 Germ theory unwittingly aroused the psychology of pollution fear in a new and acute form.
The old ‘filth diseases’ had been redefined by sanitarians during the course of the nineteenth century as ‘zymotic’ or ‘pythogenic’ diseases that were thought to generate spontaneously from human excrement and general filth, spread through miasma. Prince Albert’s death from ‘bowel fever’ (typhoid), supposedly caught from the antique sewer system at Windsor Castle, frighteningly emphasized the importance of good sanitary provision in the home. Plumbing, sewerage, and cesspits were earnestly discussed in the press, and sales of water closet sewer traps soared. Another domestic fear, ‘ptomaine poisoning’, was raised after chemists had isolated the natural toxic substances produced by bacterial degradation in the intestinal tract, a piece of science which immediately took root in the public mind in the form of ‘autointoxication’—a cesspit inside the body: ‘one cannot live over a cesspit in good health. How much more difficult to remain well if we carry our cesspit about inside us—especially when, as so often happens, the cesspit is unpleasantly full?’ Constipation (and the bowel and laxative market) was to remain a popular health obsession well into the next century.50 But bacterial fermentation proved to be a fruitful lead towards germ theory, greatly helped by improved microscopes; but it was the effective practical and experimental work of Louis Pasteur, in particular, helped to popularize the new ‘bacteriology’ and led to much public debate in the 1880s about living ‘vibrio’, ‘germs’, and other microscopic zymotic particles. Germs were likened to tiny invisible seeds or amiculae that flourished, flew, and wriggled everywhere, thriving on unwholesome matter or weakened human constitutions. Pasteur’s work on germs was soon extended by Robert Koch’s experimental finding of specific disease bacilli, with the result that specific disease micro-organisms were being discovered at the phenomenal rate of one a year between 1879 and 1900.51
Germs in fact fitted very easily into older popular notions of contagium vivum; but Koch’s discovery of specificity—germs as separate species with a life of their own—was more threatening to the older miasmatist sanitarians. Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, the author of Hygeia: A City of Health (1876), a mission statement for future macro-environmental hygienic town planning and architecture, was an old-fashioned sanitarian who placed all his faith in environmental cleansing, and considered germ-ridden laboratories immoral:
Let us drain our country on a plan of such uniformity, that every particle of pollution shall pass from our houses as it is produced there; let us cleanse our outward garments, our bodies, our food, our drink, and keep them cleansed; let us cleanse our minds as well as our garments, and keep them clean; let us isolate the contagious sick as they become contagious. Then all elaborate experiments for the prevention of disease will appear, as they are, mysterious additions to evil which ought not to exist, and which of themselves might re-introduce death into a deathless paradise.52
The specificity of germs attacked both humoralism and hygiene by denying spontaneous generation—no balancing of hot, cold, wet, or dry was required to deactivate or activate a specific contagion; nor (so it seemed) the observation of the seasons, ordering of temperaments, diet or exercise—indeed the whole paraphernalia of Hippocratic environmental and personal hygiene. The amoral biological determinism that germ theory implied (like the extreme forms of contemporary evolutionism) appeared irreligious and inhumane. For people like the anti-vivisectionist John Ruskin (who resigned his art professorship because the university appointed a professor of anatomy) and Florence Nightingale (then designing her ‘pavilion’ hospitals of light and air), microbiological science had no place in the city of Hygieia. The anti-scientific research lobby in Britain was so strong that the first British microbiological research laboratory in the 1890s was called the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine: the word ‘research’ was specifically kept out of the name to avoid a backlash from anti-vivisection groups.53 But by then the public’s belief in the existence of ‘germs’ was strong and unstoppable, and mostly far more concerned with the microscopic world than the transcendental one.
Germs were now the invisible enemy, fought at every turn. Germ theory reinforced every single lesson of the old gospel of cleanliness, but the ‘eternal vigilance’ now required made house-cleansing a heavy burden of responsibility; its neglect was akin to murder. In the new procedures of ‘domestic science’ the basic old routines of the ‘home hospital’ were now to be applied to every room, but especially to kitchens, water closets, and bedrooms. There was an emphasis on the old axis of wet-dry purification. Strong light and continual fresh air dried up and ‘cleaned’ dark and dank cellars, rooms, and privies; antiseptic washes for floors and all surfaces mopped up lurking germs. Water sources must be pure, or if necessary purified, and all plumbing fixtures and fittings regularly inspected; for greater safety, plain white porcelain and tiling was now specified for super-cleanliness in and around the water closet, bathing, and food preparation areas. Laundry had to have ten minutes of boiling to kill germs (and vegetables only slightly less). Every kitchen saucepan and utensil had to be burnished and sterilized, every work surface cleaned off and disinfected daily, food cooled and covered with cloths to prevent germs from settling and breeding; new kitchen food refrigerators were found necessary in the hotter American climate. Since bacilli were also now known to live on in dry form, household dust was considered especially lethal. Thick curtains, wallpaper, heavy carpeting, ornate furniture, and knick-knacks were discouraged; and the use of damp cloths and mops were urged instead of sweeping and dusting—or even better, the new vacuum cleaner, for those who could afford it. Even dress length was affected, after domestic science reformers criticized long hems that brushed in the dirt and dust, bringing potential disease from the street directly into the home.
Complete isolation, or ‘asepsis’—the bodily procedures that soon put germ-conscious surgical staff into gloves, masks, and gowns—was obviously not feasible for daily life; but nonetheless certain procedures closely resembled the ancient purity rules. Contact with any other person’s body was dangerous. Kissing and hugging, even among members of the family, could be a risk, with strangers even more so; public handshaking was perilous (women were advised to wear gloves), and public coughing and spitting even worse (carrying a clean handkerchief was essential). Household food had to come from ‘clean’ retailers and shopworkers (hygienically produced ‘branded’ goods were safest) and preferably clean-wrapped in front of your eyes (transparent cellophane soon met this need). The whole suspect outer world—neatly summed up as ‘flies, fingers, food’—obviously included the old insect pests such as fleas, the bedbug, nits, and body lice. Flies were a new fear that had been raised by agricultural science and the experience of fighting mosquitoes; they were now known to leave their invisible sticky footprints everywhere, randomly, and the life cycle of the fly was widely discussed in the press. The ‘house-fly danger’ campaign led to much covering of food and drink with beaded lace doilies, muslin over the baby’s perambulator, fly screens, and campaigns against street refuse, manure heaps, and horse droppings. A new deluge of toxic sprays, gases, waters, and powders was directed at all these old and new insect enemies, including paraffin, arsenic, and lead compounds, as well as the traditional disinfectants (vinegar, soap, lime, derris dust).54
Levels of pollution fear among the general public must have been raised exceptionally high in those early days, even though an outpouring of domestic technical innovation was providing new solutions and familiarity gradually softened the new scientific routines. Bacteriology could increasingly identify and thus help prevent disease causation; but specific chemical therapeutics (‘magic bullets’) only arrived halfway through the next century, when the subsequent development of immunology—with its idea of the ‘fighting body’—also reduced anxiety and somewhat restored the human status quo. But scientific uncertainty left a good deal of room for divided opinion, perhaps even for a divided mind: you could be sanguine and optimistic one day, or for some reason fearful and pessimistic the next. Hygienic health reform fragmented and intensified, but the main body of sanitarians took the common-sense, broadly optimistic approach and threw themselves into practical action. The civic hygiene and domestic science reformers in Britain and particularly North America operated through an avalanche of national and local committees, mass meetings, posters, tracts, books, magazines, newspapers, and advertising campaigns, and finally succeeded in changing domestic habits and manners and raising levels of domestic cleanliness to a degree undreamt of, in a remarkably short time (at least among urban populations—rural populations were not so accessible). A mass civic campaign against tuberculosis at the turn of the century hammered the message home.55
The pessimists were equally active, and just as desperate. There was still a large rump of physical puritan reformers campaigning hard against all the depravities of modern civilization, and the array of purity crusaders in Britain and America that arose during the last two decades of the century (and carried on well into the next century) was truly formidable. The ethics of personal hygiene and purity were stretched to the limit by (among others) birth control and eugenic ‘social hygiene’ enthusiasts, sexual purity campaigners against public prostitution and private ‘onanism’ (masturbation), the anti-science lobby of the anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, and animal welfare movements, and the purest of the pure, the extreme vegetarians who refused any contact with animal matter (the vegans), or to inflict any pain on living things (the fruitarians). In Britain a joint alliance, the Humanitarian League, gave them a unified public platform in 1890.56 But empiric healers such as herbalists, homoeopaths, osteopaths, spiritualists, and hydropaths were now truly locked out of modern science—satirized as dogmatic medical ‘cults’, under fire from medical licensing authorities, and completely outpaced by medical technology and new standards of rigorous scientific training in the medical colleges. Some awareness of the isolated position of the old medical democrats can be seen in the so-called Eclectic Movement at the end of the century, which united all their skills in a brand-new identity eventually called Naturopathy. Given the widespread popularity of the drug-free nature cure, one of the more emotional, or instinctive, public reactions to extreme materialism was evidently self-purification, and another bout of rugged, rural, primitivism.
The two key empirics who reinvented the nature cure were Arnold Rikli, who opened his ‘sanatorium’ in the Swiss mountains at Veldes in the 1870s, and Adolf Just, author of the mystic Return to Nature (1896), who opened Jungborn in the Austrian Harz Mountains in the 1880s. Both took their cue from Priessnitzian hydropathy but took it a step further. They preferred patients to take their baths naked and exposed to the elements: Adolf Just even revived the eighteenth-century vitalist earth bath (being buried up to the neck). At Veldes patients lived in ‘air huts’ (three wooden walls with an open front) on the shore of a lake, and sunbathed on two large platforms, naked except for modesty aprons and protected with smoked sunglasses and straw hats. Veldes was so successful that Rikli had to open another, winter establishment where patients could outdo each other in their endurance of snow and cold air.57 But the huge popular success of the nature cure came with the charitable, or free, regime devised by the celebrated Father Sebastian Kneipp (1821–97) at Wörishofen in the Austrian Alps in the 1890s.58 The thoroughly vitalist and Priessnitzian Kneipp sent his patients and followers out for strenuous walks and swims in the mountains wearing minimal loose hygienic clothing, such as ‘Father Kneipp Swimming Trousers’ or the Reformed (porous) vests, shirts, and shorts invented by Dr Gustav Jaeger and promoted by Just, but preferably wearing nothing at all—he disapproved of clothes. Kneipp also invented the ‘dew bath’ (walking with bare feet over dewy wet grass, wet stones, or even fresh snow), and insisted on the ‘vitality’ of bare feet.59 Heavily popularized in the press, the naked air bath movement spread rapidly throughout Germany via societies for natural methods of healing and living, which encouraged municipal councils to set up public air baths in grassland enclosures on the outskirts of the town, surrounded by very high board fences. Photographs show naked brass band rehearsals and newspaper-reading, as well as bowling, turning, and gymnastics. Amateur sunbathing at the end of the century required professional instructions as grave and careful as any eighteenth-century balneologist:
Sun baths should not be confounded with air baths, for they are essentially different types of baths. If the body is kept exposed in the open air to the action of the sun’s rays, the bath becomes a sunlight bath. It is well known that the energy of light rays is beneficial to the human system… The position of the body should be frequently changed so as to expose it on all sides. The duration of the sun bath should not exceed 20 to 30 minutes, at the end of which usually free perspiration has set in. After the bath one should take a full water bath of 90 to 95 Fahr., and finish up with friction rubbing…. Modifications of the air bath, which require but brief mention, are… the ‘genuine rain bath’, i.e. walking in air-bath costume during a rainstorm, which is only intended for those with strong constitutions; the earth, sand, and moor baths; and finally the snow bath… One may either roll in the snow outside, or else gather a pail of it, bring it into the room and rub the body with the soft and warm snow.60
By 1900 the mountain-top air bath movement had become one of main convalescent techniques of turn-of-the-century mainstream medicine—the super-hygienic tuberculosis sanatorium, architecturally designed with the emphasis on the open-air life and sunlight baths, with the nature cure as a model.61 But a Kneipp enthusiast, Benedict Lust, took naturism into the twentieth century by amalgamating the essential elements of the nature cure and changing its name, opening his American School of Naturopathy in New York in 1901, and founding the Naturopathic Society of America in 1902. In Lust’s Naturopath and Herald of Health magazine, artificial modern drugs were unutterable poisons and the higher moral goal of naturopathy was ‘ideal living’ or complete wellness: ‘Massive muscle, Surging Blood, Tingling Nerve, Zestful Digestion, Superb Sex, Beautiful Body, Sublime Thought, Pulsating Power’.62 Kneippism was represented in Britain by the brief Nature Cure Annual of 1907–8, but had quickly spread along the grapevine among ‘the more enlightened of the Bohemian class’, including the beard-and-sandals vegetarian socialism of Bernard Shaw and members of the Fabian Society and their ‘set’; or the artistic ‘Pagan’ students and their set, who swam and sunbathed naked on the Cambridge backs. Many were proud to call themselves ‘neo-pagans’ at the end of the century (though not many were as vehemently anti-Christian as the hardy hiker Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900).63 But the simple natural life—simplicity de luxe—also attracted such millionaire Nonconformists as the Reformed food manufacturer Dr Harvey Kellogg; or the Liverpool soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme, who slept in a specially designed open-air bedroom containing little else but a simple iron bed and an enormous marble bath.64
Amidst all this frenzy of political, social, and economic activity and reform the very poorest were still completely powerless. Although by the end of the century Britain was, to the outward eye, a clean and washed nation, the inhabitants knew better. The immaculate Victorian home was a middle-class dream, with a big shortfall. As one cleric dourly noted in 1889:
The rich man’s family may grow up unbroken around the hearth … The children of the poor must die … What is it to the poor that it has been proved how cleanliness is the secret of health? They cannot have the latest sanitary appliances. They cannot take baths, or have a constant change of clothing… The poor, by bad air, by dirt, by accident, cannot live out half their days. The good news about health which science preaches to the rich is not preached to them.65
The political mood at the end of the century was sombre; and the rise of the racial purity crusaders, the eugenicists, reflected a profound crisis of confidence. Several peaks of the sanitary crusade had been and gone, and there was anxiety about what should follow. The sense of outstanding sins of omission towards the poor sustained the British evangelical slum settlement movement at the end of the century that produced grim reports such as those of William Booth and many others—a sort of national reckoning of the state of the poor. It was not that municipal sanitary reform had not worked (of that they were sure); but that the job was half done, and the central features of poverty had not disappeared despite the high expectations (experience of lifelong work in the charity sector convinced Sidney and Beatrice Webb that only full state intervention would succeed). These problems were tackled with further reforms in the next century. Meanwhile, the infrastructure that the nineteenth-century engineers and politicians built still sustains many of us, on a daily basis.
