Essay review: the fictive history of Victorian science and empire.

In 1820 two French scientists - Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou - discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the 'wondrous' fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit.

Edward Ballard and the Practice of Epidemiology in the 19th-Century United Kingdom.

This article recovers the history of Victorian epidemiology through the career of British physician Edward Ballard (1820-1897). Ballard's career provides a useful window into the practices of epidemiology in the 19th century because he held notable public health posts as medical officer of health for Islington and inspector at the Medical Department of the Local Government Board. By the time of his death, in 1897, he typified the transition toward professional epidemiology.

A conflict of analysis: analytical chemistry and milk adulteration in Victorian Britain.

This article centres on a particularly intense debate within British analytical chemistry in the late nineteenth century, between local public analysts and the government chemists of the Inland Revenue Service. The two groups differed in both practical methodologies and in the interpretation of analytical findings. The most striking debates in this period were related to milk analysis, highlighted especially in Victorian courtrooms.

The perfect food and the filth disease: milk-borne typhoid and epidemiological practice in late Victorian Britain.

This article explores the initial set of epidemiological investigations in Victorian Britain that linked typhoid fever to milk from dairy cattle. Because Victorian epidemiologists first recognized the milk-borne route in outbreaks of typhoid fever, these investigations served as a model for later studies of milk-borne scarlet fever, diphtheria, and perhaps tuberculosis. By focusing on epidemiological practices conducted by Medical Inspectors at the Medical Department of the Local Government Board and Medical Officers of Health, I show that Victorian epidemiology was committed to field-based, observational methods that defined the professional nature of the discipline and its theories and practices.