Resistance and Prevention: Rural local government and the fight against tuberculosis.

With Wales considered 'the blackest spot on the tuberculosis map' of Britain, the Welsh National Memorial Association (WNMA) was founded in 1910 with the aim to rid Wales of the disease within a generation. Although the Association's vision of a national health service was lauded by contemporaries as providing a model for England, as the WNMA took over the running of tuberculosis services from local authorities, it met with resistance from county and rural district councils. This essay explores this resistance.

'I should have thought that Wales was a wet part of the world': Drought, Rural Communities and Public Health, 1870-1914.

From 1884 onwards, Britain experienced a series of major droughts, which reached their peak in the 'Long Drought' (1890-1909). Despite being imagined as a wet part of the world, rural Wales was hard hit as many communities did not have access to reliable water supplies. As medical officers of health and newspapers talked about water famines, alarm focused on questions of purity and disease as drought was presented as a serious health risk.

Thinking regionally: narrative, the medical humanities and region.

Drawing on multiple literatures from history, geography, anthropology, sociology and literature, this essay asks questions about what we mean by region and why narratives of region should matter to the medical humanities. The essay surveys how region can be used as a lens of analysis, exploring the various academic approaches to region and their limitations. It argues that regions are dynamic but also unstable as a category of analysis and are often used uncritically by scholars.

"In a country every way by nature favourable to health": Landscape and Public Health in Victorian Rural Wales.

Rather than seeing landscape as an invisible backdrop to sanitary reform, this article offers another context through which to consider the problems facing local authorities and sanitary officials in identifying and tackling sanitary problems. Using Wales as a case study, this article first addresses how rural landscapes were imagined and second how as "environments" and "territories" they influenced patterns of sanitary reform. If underlying ideological meanings were attached to the landscape, as this article suggests, the rural landscape was a plural one in that it also acted as a barrier to sanitary reform.

"Unfit for human consumption": tuberculosis and the problem of infected meat in late Victorian Britain.

By the 1890s, questions about tuberculous meat in Britain served to transform the issue of infected meat from an ill-defined to a concrete threat. Veterinarians, building on European inoculation (or transmission) experiments, played a prominent part in constructing the debate, with medical officers of health following. With the emergence of bacteriology in the 1880s, a consensus emerged about the dangers of tuberculous meat: Robert Koch's identification of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, and the connection he saw between bovine tuberculosis and the disease in man, provided confirmation of the disease's danger to man.

Mayhem and medical students: image, conduct, and control in the Victorian and Edwardian London teaching hospital.

In exploring how the image of the medical student was created and modified during the nineteenth century, this article suggests that stereotypes first put forward in the 1820s were in part a product of the trend towards institutional medical education. They quickly acquired a cultural resonance that reflected concerns about the nature of medicine and fears of the urban. By the late nineteenth century, however, the medical student was being reinvented as part of doctors' efforts to improve the status of medicine and rework stereotypes so that they reflected the values associated with the professional gentlement.