Right now I'm reading about Jane Addams's Hull House and the high rates of tuberculosis and typhoid among Chicago's poor. What did Victorian disease control look like?
Thank you!
Short answer:
What "Victorian disease control" looks like depends on just who, when and where you're talking about.
Discussion:
Public health changes dramatically in the "Victorian" period-- when Victoria takes the throne in 1837, you're substantially in a world where public health would be familiar to men alive hundreds of years earlier. When she dies in 1901, knowledge and practice are vastly different, recognizably modern. Just how this new knowledge finds its way into public health practice is a matter of time and place.
As just one example of the dramatic change -- consider the "germ theory of disease". Microorganisms were known before the 19th century, Anton van Leeuwenhoek's work with the microscope in the 17th century gets him the sobriquet "Father of Microbiology", and there were some suggestions that microorganisms were responsible for disease, but no one knew how, as Victoria was crowned.
By contrast, by the time of Edward's coronation, scientists have discovered that:
Celebrated names in microbiology -- Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch-- are working during this period. For public health, the most important name is John Snow, who investigating a cholera outbreak in London, uses statistics and maps to locate the source of the disease at the Broad Street Pump. Not only does this solve the question of how this epidemic was caused, its part of the most important public health measures of the modern era-- engineering a clean public water supply, effectively separated from sewage, and the monitoring of public health by epidemiology.
Cities are adopting new sanitation and public health policies during the 19th century, so you'd have to dig into the specifics of Chicago's policies at a more precise date than "Victorian" to know just what the policies in place were. No effective pharmaceuticals for typhoid existed-- today we've got effective antibiotics, but that's a 20th century innovation. Without medications, treatment is largely keeping the patient from getting dehydrated; and the key to ending a typhoid outbreak is clean water. Tuberculosis was a disease without any effective medical treatment until the 20th century . . . in the 19th, various spurious patent medicines might claim utility, but the standard treatment, for one who could afford it, was to leave the city for "better air".
Charles Rosenberg has done the most detailed study I know of looking at just how one disease, cholera, was approached at three different points in the 19th century. He's looking at New York City specifically, but the ideas would likely have applied to Chicago and other big cities. Typhoid and Cholera cause similar symptoms and were of much greater public health concern than tuberculosis -- which is a slow disease, kills a lot of people, but it's chronic, more like cancer or heart disease today. So tuberculosis doesn't really have "outbreaks" in the period-- it's everywhere, all the time, a background disease mostly of cities, but not producing acute public health crises.
This was also the age of "patent medicines" and rampant medical quackery-- newspapers filled with advertisements for spurious cures, which druggists sold largely without regulation. Early in the century we find such useless ingredients as spiderwebs being promoted as a cure for tuberculosis.
See:
Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
William J. Novak. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in 19th Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Tuite, Ashleigh R., et al. “Cholera, Canals, and Contagion: Rediscovering Dr Beck's Report.” Journal of Public Health Policy, vol. 32, no. 3, 2011, pp. 320–333.
Charles Rosenberg. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
Owen Whooley, *Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. (*University of Chicago Press, 2013)
David Mclean, Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform: Cholera, the State and the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain, (I.B, Tauris: 2006)
Hartnett, John C. “The Cobweb or Spider's Web: The Dreamy Stuff of 19th Century Pharmacy and Therapeutics.” Pharmacy in History, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 11–17.