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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism
- 1 Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review
- 2 The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’
- 3 ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
- 4 Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician
- 5 The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
- Coda: Medical Humanism and Blackwood's Magazine at the Fin de Siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism
- 1 Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review
- 2 The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’
- 3 ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
- 4 Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician
- 5 The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
- Coda: Medical Humanism and Blackwood's Magazine at the Fin de Siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Poor Simon's sick.” “Then for the Doctor send.”
“The Union Doctor? He lives far away –
Seven miles, and has seven parishes, they say,
And his own private practice to attend.
Besides, sick Simon has no idle friend,
Where all must work; nor has he pence to pay;
Nor comes the Doctor without order penn'd
By th’ Overseer – and this is market-day.”
As David Hamilton has noted, ‘[i]t was in the pages of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwoods [sic] Magazine that the fi rst signs of the growth of power of central government in health matters can be seen’. Hamilton is referring to the vehement debates regarding poor law reform that featured in both periodicals in the 1830s and 1840s. In Blackwood's the debate was pursued across factual articles, fi ction and even poetry. For example, the above quoted sonnet on ‘Parish Sick and Parish Doctor’, published in Blackwood's in April 1838, criticises the system of medical provision for the poor in England following the New Poor Law of 1834 as offi cious, ineffective, and controlled by the commercial forces represented by the ‘market-day’. While the rise of public health is most often associated with sanitary reform and the work of Edwin Chadwick (1800–90), prior to the shift towards eradicating fi lth proselytised by Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), commentators on public health focused on social rather than environmental issues. They were concerned with the question of how far the central government should intercede in alleviating the miseries of poverty and the poor working conditions associated with industrial labour. The burgeoning fi eld thus became a major site for the ideological clash between liberals devoted to Malthusian political economics (and thus minimal state intervention) and progressive Tories who instead argued for a paternalistic and often morally and religiously oriented approach. Given their political alignments, it is unsurprising that Blackwood's and the Edinburgh Review often served as platforms for these opposing points of view.
Hamlin recounts how in the early nineteenth century,
[a]n age of benevolence, rooted in the elevation of sentiment and the presumption of a ‘moral economy’ regulating social relations, gives way to an age of austere political economy, thriving on confl ict and rooted in what are conceived the natural laws of human society, like those espoused by Ebenezer Scrooge.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical PressBlackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858, pp. 172 - 203Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017