So wrote James Burn Russell, Glasgow's first full-time Medical Officer of Health, in a supplement to the Report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board published in 1879. Russell, a great advocate of the cause of public health and sanitation, investigated suspicious deaths that occurred at the Adelphi Hair Factory, Glasgow, in 1878, and came to the conclusion that the causative organism was in fact Bacillus anthracis. At the same time, John Henry Bell was confidently asserting that a ‘septic poison’ was responsible for woolsorters' disease in Bradford. Russell's report – tucked away in an obscure publication – remained largely unknown to his fellow practitioners until at least April 1880, when he presented on the topic to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, by which time Bell had already made the connection between woolsorters' disease and anthrax.

As we saw in earlier chapters, anthrax featured prominently in the public life of Bradford. However, cases of the disease were by no means limited to either the town or the wider environ of West Yorkshire. This chapter seeks to contrast the research cultures and public characterizations of woolsorters' disease and anthrax in locations across Britain with those in Bradford, focusing primarily on Glasgow, Kidderminster and East Anglia.