Prostitution and Victorian social reform

medicine, because they are "personal biographies". The "ideas and methods" of these civil servants were part of the lives of real people: the impersonal and impassioned Chadwick and the diplomatic but authoritarian Simon. Finer's account of the scandal of the Andover workhouse for example displays vividly the working of Victorian government through the personal frustrations of Chadwick. Amongst historians of science these days, to profess to be writing a biography is equivalent to admitting one is not quite right in the head. As though the very act were incomparable with the very best social, political, or scientific history. By the end of this book Farr's bones have little more flesh on them than they had at the beginning. Maybe he was a dull dog, uncontroversial, not given to emotional outburst, a model bourgeois paterfamilias. I doubt it. Sometimes Eyler lets slip things that point to unexplored territories in Farr's persona. Farr once claimed "There is a relation betwixt the forms of death and moral excellence or infamy" (p. 128). I am not sure if I know what that means, but I should like to know what Farr meant by it, and what sort of a man could say it. Christopher Lawrence Wellcome Museum at the Science Museum