Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1995

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

History

Major Professor

John Bohstedt

Committee Members

Palmira Brummett, Paul Pinckney

Abstract

This study concerns two public health problems in Victorian Leicester: sewerage and 'summer diarrhoea.' The problems are considered to have been constructed socially as well as materially. While neither problem was unique to Leicester, there were circumstances which made the town's responses to the problems unique. The methodological lens for the study is a quasi-Kuhnian conceptualization called an 'accepted remedy.’ It is posited that the existence or absence of a consensually-held accepted remedy for a specific public health problem was a significant factor in determining how a community would respond to the problem and how successful such a response might be. Relying on archival data from local politicians, national bureaucrats, local and medical presses, and other interested parties, it can be said that Leicester acted about twenty years in advance of an accepted remedy on sewerage problems and that no accepted remedy for 'summer diarrhoea' arose during the period 1849-1891. Leicester's precocity with regard to sewerage resulted in an expensive failure and an unwillingness to reinvest in a system that would comply with the accepted remedy once it became widely held. 'Summer diarrhoea' remained too complex a phenomenon to yield to an accepted remedy and became a subject of theory, investigation, frustration, and thousands of infant deaths in Victorian Leicester. It is recommended that the concept of an accepted remedy be applied to other historical problems in public health to see if it is a tool that aids understanding.

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