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,