‘The perfection of his taste’: Ralph Bernal, collecting and slave-ownership in nineteenth-century Britain

Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-Century Britain

We would like to thank Graham Mooney and Andrew Noymer and Beth Jarosz for their responses to our ‘Second Opinion’ on ‘Infectious Disease and the Epidemiological Transition in Victorian Britain’. Mooney offers a robust attack on our general claim that the importance of infectious diseases as a cause of death in the nineteenth century has been overstated, while seeming to accept what we say abou...

Mortality in mid nineteenth century Britain

RICHARD CAVENDISH, The powers of evil in western religion, magic and folk belief, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, 8vo, pp. ix, 299, £5.95. Evil supernatural agencies are part of every culture in degrees varying with their sophistication. As is to be expected, primitive man is surrounded by them, but they are of course still believed in by races who boast advanced social and cultural devel...

A geography of nineteenth-century Britain

Drug Adulteration, Detection and Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Drug adulteration is equally important for the history of medicine, pharmacy, the pure sciences such as chemistry and physics, and social history. This is fully appreciated by Stieb whose book, in some measure, forms a companion volume to F. A. Filby's A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis, London, 1934. After a general introduction leading to the year 1820 (Accum's Treatise on Adulterati...

Atmospheric Pollution and Child Health in Late Nineteenth Century Britain

Atmospheric pollution was an important side effect of coal-fired industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In Britain emissions of black smoke were on the order of fifty times as high as they were a century later. In this paper we examine the effects of these emissions on child development by analysing the heights on enlistment during the First World War of men born in England and Wales in t...