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 about epidemics, while Noymer and Jarosz take us to task on what counts as an infectious disease and also provide a critique of the specific limitations of our claims when applied to New England. We are pleased that our piece generated such reactions and hope that the debate will continue. Mooney was mightily offended by our apparent neglect of the work of historical demographers, and on reflection we regret not giving this aspect more attention, including the excellent articles and chapters that Mooney has published over the years. For this, we apologise. However, historical demographers were not our target, for we are well aware of the work they have done and the nuanced picture they have now presented of changes in mortality patterns; indeed, we would have been unable to present our piece without this work. That said, one of our key points was that the complex picture they have produced has yet to find its way into mainstream social and economic history books, or popular understandings of Victorian Britain. Why this is so we can only speculate. Part of the reason may be that the work of historical demographers, with very notable exceptions, such as that of Wrigley, Schofield and Woods, has not been accessible to less numerate colleagues, who seem to prefer dramatic contrasts between disease and death