Based on extensive archival research encompassing over eighty rural authorities in Wales, this essay pieces together fragmentary evidence to reveal the main contours of rural responses to infectious outbreaks from the 1870s to the 1918/10 influenza pandemic. At the centre of the essay are those practical, short-term measures that have hitherto been overlooked in the historiography. While infectious outbreaks did have the capacity to extend sanitary initiatives over the medium and long term, looking at how rural authorities reacted to infectious disease helps us better understand how public health practices translated into action at a local level. In doing so, the essay untangles both the nature of rural responses and the challenges confronted by rural sanitary officials when confronted with infectious outbreaks and how they had to adapt public health orthodoxy to different rural environments.

Claims that rural communities and rural authorities in Wales were backwards conceal not only growing sensitivity to industrial river pollution, but also their active efforts to regulate the region's rivers. This article uses evidence from South Wales to explore rural responses to industrial river pollution and to provide the micro-contextualisation essential for understanding how environmental nuisances were tackled around sites of pollution. Efforts to limit industrial effluent at both local and regional levels highlight strategies of control, the difficulties of intervention at the boundaries of authorities, and how rural authorities were not always peripheral to an urban metropole. This lack of passivity challenges the idea that river pollution interventions merely displaced rather than confronted the problem of pollution, providing insights into how rural authorities worked, and into how those living in rural communities turned to them to clean up their environment.

This essay brings together aspects of the history of science, food, and culture, and applies them to the study of Anglo-German relations and perceptions by examining how between 1850 and 1914 the German sausage was used as a metaphor for the German nation. The essay shows how the concerns that became attached to German sausages not only provide a way of understanding Britain's interaction with Germany but also reveal further dimensions to popular anti-German sentiment. Alarm about what went into German sausages formed part of a growing strand of popular opposition to Germany, which drew on increasing insecurity about Britain's position on the world stage and the perceived economic threat that Germany and German immigrants presented. Such sentiment was translated into how Germans were caricatured and onto material objects—in this case, the “deadly mysteries” that were feared to go into German sausages. Cultural and gastronomic stereotypes overlapped in a discourse that linked Germany and Germans to their national diet and aggressive nature, as well as associated German sausages with fears about diseased meat, adulteration, and the risks that eating them entailed. The result was that the German sausage was used as a staple for satirical comic representations of Germany, as representative of dishonesty in food production, and as a xenophobic slur. Around the German sausage, anti-German sentiment and questions of food safety merged and became mutually reinforcing.

Although historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a ‘long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease’ in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment.

In the early-twentieth century, moves to prevent infection from tuberculosis became an integral part of local government public health schemes. While the scale of action was dependent on individual authorities and ratepayers, interest was not limited to the pulmonary form of the disease. Effort was also directed at tackling bovine tuberculosis, which by the 1890s had become “the most important disease of cows” and, with its zoonotic properties accepted, “a substantial risk to the … consumer”. With meat and milk identified as the main vectors, moves to detect infected livestock and limit the spread of the disease became part of a wider preventive strategy. Measures were introduced to control the sale of tuberculous meat and milk. Eradication schemes were promoted, as concern merged with a growing interest in food safety and agriculture, and became caught up with debates on national efficiency, farming and child health.